2008 The Bend

The Bend Edited By: Jarrett Haley Christina Yu Jared Randall Stephanie Magdalena White

Number Five University of Notre Dame

The Bend Number Five Managing Editor: Jarrett Haley Content Editors: Jared Randall Stephanie Magdalena White Christina Yu Front Cover Photograph: Karen Randall Design: Jarrett Haley Back Cover Photograph: Nicolle Haley Copyright c. 2008 The Bend Rights revert to author upon publication Our graduate M.F.A. Creative Writing program is a two-year literary immersion. We offer workshops with nationally acclaimed writers and literature classes with a distinguished Department of English faculty. Our community is small and congenial (we admit ten writers a year), and part of a large and lively intellectual community in the larger English Department. We have a diverse group of all ages and backgrounds and offer a year-round program of visitors and readings. All students write a thesis—a collection of stories or creative nonfiction, a novel, or a collection of poetry—and work closely with a thesis advisor.

The Bend does not read unsolicited manuscripts.

Printed in the United States

CONTENTS Tony D’Souza

Of Leviathans and Porpoises.......... 1

Renée E. D’Aoust

Girl Born Dirt in China ................. 3 Not Fish..................................... 3

Sean K. Henry

My Beach ...................................... 4 Mother’s Bark...........................13

Jaclyn Dwyer Stacy Cartledge

Holding on to Childhood..............14 tramontating................................21 couplets.....................................22 ode on distance .........................23

Amy Faith De Betta

The Greater East Albuquerque Co-Prosperity Sphere................24

Sarah Bowman

The Oak Spirit.............................36

Esteban Galindo

Mrs. Foster Douglas ....................45

Mary Marie Dixon

Shorty’s Lament ..........................61 Pilgrimage.................................62

William McGee, Jr.

Through the Valley .....................63

Christina Kubasta

The New House ..........................79

S.D. Dillon

On Site........................................80

Mark Matson

Sa 06/09/2007 4:30pm...............81 R 06/14/07 2:00pm .................82

Clare Christina

goodbye.......................................83 the garden.................................84 reading aesop............................85

Amy Irish

A Destined Shore ........................86

Tom Miller

Oakum’s Razor...........................87

Dawn M. Comer

The Thing Is…...........................93

Christina Yu

A Note for Visitors....................106

Rumit Pancholi

Mired........................................107

Lisa De Niscia

Pepper .......................................108

Alan Lindsay

Merrimack, N.H. ......................110 No Private Language ..............112

James M. Wilson

Acedia.......................................113 Balloon Man...........................114

Chris Gerben

after the movie..........................116

David Ewald

Can’t Keep the Spider...............119

Danna Ephland

Notes for Needle ......................128 Needle and the Ditch..............129 Needle Moves In With Louie..130

Corey Madsen

Snow In Darkness Will Fall........131

Editor’s Note

We come each of us with our own little histories, rent a room and sit in it, then leave all of us owning a common property— the place we knew once that others know now.

If you’re reading this, you already know the Bend.

Jarrett Haley South Bend, Indiana, May 2008

Tony D'Souza

Of Leviathans and Porpoises From The Voyage of the Rosa Many are the days that we see porpoises that dance about the Rosa in the water. And so we look at the sea for mermaids who often travel in the company of porpoises but the cook says that mermaids do not tend to the open sea but to the lee sides of rocks. And I asked if he has ever seen mermaids and he has and their hair is black like the weeds of the sea and they are very beautiful and I asked if he has ever lain with a mermaid and he said that he has that on one voyage they captured a mermaid in a net and all the men laid with her many times over many days despite her protests. And I did ask What did you do with her then and he did say We ate of the fish part of her. And I did ask if it was like lying with a human woman and he said that it was better in some ways but that they are covered with fish slime.

I did tell this to Diego and Diego did say that I was a fool that the cook was teasing that there are no more mermaids in the sea that the voyages gone before us have hunted and killed them so that they are frightened and flee from the ships of men. And then I did ask him about sea dragons to which the soldiers cast alms of salt into the sea to ward them away for sea dragons as all men know detest salt and then we laughed at the fear of the men on those voyages before Bojador for they had lamented of falling off the worlds very edge but the Prince had made them round Bojador and not only had they not fallen off the edge but they had reached the Gold River and only riches had come to Portugal since. And now Portugal has grain from the Grain Coast and Gold from the Gold Coast and one day Portugal will reach even Cathay. And then all the Lowlanders and Angles and even the Spanish counts will reflect on how they had promised that our caravels would fall off the edge of the world even as the riches of the world have begun to come to us. For Madiera belongs to us now as the Gold River and the Grain Coast and the Gold Coast belong to us and all of it is Portugal. And yet for all of this there is something inside of me that sees the edge of the world

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before us on every horizon and still there is something inside of me that fears that we will fall off the world though the cook has no time for this and says we will not.

Now the men cast nets for fish and the sea is a vast bounty that cannot be finished and though the nets are often empty that is as it was on Galilee and the fish move about in great congresses of their kind and it is only a matter of providence and when we happen upon a great congress of these fish as the Savior delivered to his disciples we must merely dip the nets into the water to draw up great masses of fish more than can be eaten by anyone. To this we are plagued by shorebirds who foul the whole deck.

Then after a rain there was a leviathan blowing smoke from his flume and Diego and I and even the Extramaduran who shits milk and blood stood at the rail with the men and we were all frightened to be swallowed by it. But the captain set a tack to overtake the leviathan despite the protests of the men and when the leviathan was abroadside we could see its pig eye and then though it was big we could see that it was only a very big fish with its pig eye. There were shell creatures on its skin and it seemed in that way an ancient thing.

Then the captain let the soldiers unload their hackbuts into it for sport and the smoke of the shooting clouded the deck and the leviathan dove to the depths of the sea in great swirls of foam and ribbons of its blood. Then I and many of us were greatly frightened of the wrath of the leviathan that it should surface and batter us in its wounded rage but when it surfaced again its smoke was red with its blood. Then it began to list and the captain tacked us to it and the soldiers unloaded a cannon into the belly of the leviathan. Then the sea was awash in blood and meat and the leviathan rolled and groaned and then it spouted blood from its flume and then it stilled and was dead. Then they unloaded the cannon into it again and its intestines swirled into the sea like cords. I should say that our cannon is such a fearsome thing that it makes one glad that it belongs to us. From that day on I have had no fear of leviathans and though we have seen them again billowing their smoke it is as though they fear us for they keep their distance from us as they should.

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Renée E. D’Aoust

Girl Born Dirt in China The dirt mound of one enters your embrace, I am digging your embrace. I am digging to China where a child mourns.

To China where a child mourns her body of fluid holes— the dirt mound of one enters.

Not Fish Oily, pungent, not fish, but a fisherman and a memory when sand mixed in hair because he reached for my body and with it the sand on which we had fallen together while the ocean stayed nearby. His hands swollen from nets, lines, hooks grabbed, unhooked, fish tossed into the hold, suctioned out to the tender; while I stayed on the shore, nearby and watching. Later those fingers began parting each strand of hair, freeing each lone piece of sand, pummeled and worn from the sea.

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Sean K Henry

My Beach High noon and Ocean Beach Fishing Pier belong to me for half an hour. Sun way up there, poking through clouds with its big eye, like it’s looking for me to tell me I’m late again. I feel the heat leaning on me saying, hold on now, I’m only playing with you, as it tries to singe the little ridge my forehead makes over my eyebrow.

Wish I had a ball cap but I’d probably have the thing on backwards anyway. Heat don’t bother me at all, at least not this kind. I’m in short sleeves, though, a tie, khaki Dockers, but with the pant hem rolled up in two cuffs. Dress code at my work makes it hard to sport a ball cap anyhow. My toes are buried in the sand to keep cool.

People are half-naked, but I’m the only fool sitting on my shoes stuffed full of my socks on the beach, ripping through a Carne Asada burrito and a Coke. The idle pier to my left looks like a long, wooden ladder spotted with moss, missing a rung, barely submerged on its side in the middle of the ocean. No one, not even the usual bored Mexican or Philippine fishermen are fishing or hanging over the pier to watch and point at surfers straddling and rocking their boards as everyone waits for that righteous wave. Guess everyone has jobs during the week. Even seagulls are employed, toiling their feathered asses off in this sun. Some of them skim the waves and get sprayed as blue water miss them by inches. Natural air-condition for them. I envy birds able to spread their wings so close to the waves like that. A concrete wall with painted signs that don’t allow alcohol on or against the seawall straddles the beach all the way up to the Lifeguard Station, a big white building with a Red Cross on it. Nobody home there. People stroll, some tourists, but mostly office folks, walking fast with Hi and Nice Day greetings. No one even paying attention to palm trees that look like tall, naked stick men with tattered, straw sombreros on their heads. I drop my Hilfiger on my eyes and throw my face to the sun, chewing at it and thinking, yeah, wish this was my Beach because nothing in the world beats sitting in sand surrounded by seaweed and the hot sun.

Goddamn it! Nothing! Then I hear something, a female voice that’s a bit too damn cheerful for my taste.

“What a wonderful day! A beautiful sun, isn’t it? It’s about time. Now this is why I moved to California. This weather I could get used to.” I wasn’t even sure she was talking to me. I’m looking around, chewing still, but slower, trying to see who on the pier or on

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the seawall put her up to this. But I see nothing but sand all the way up to the seawall. I give her a minute to walk on by, get her ass out of my sun and save face, or start again with Once Upon A Time because she’s not for real. She must have risen from the sand when I wasn’t looking, because this isn’t happening.

“Uh huh. Yeah. Nice day it is.” There go all my childhood lessons about talking with food in my mouth. I swallow my morsel that’s been way over-chewed by now and I’m cautiously thinking about another bite of my lunch. Can’t though, because I don’t know what to expect. My shoes all of a sudden feel like a wooden folding chair that’s splitting down the middle, parting the sand. Big smile she has, with fresh glossy lips. Then she removes her sneakers from her naked feet and does likewise, puts them together then sits on them in the sand but a little ways in front of me so that I have no problem talking to her back if she wants me to.

Feet manicured, white like the insides of a medium cooked salmon.

Red nail polish on perfect rectangular shaped toenails--even her little toes. On long middle toes, two silver toe rings that look like they cost about a dollar each at a flea market. So now we look to the Public, who were minding its business, like a couple whose having some problems dealing with issues. We look like a black and white couple on the verge of breaking up, about to prove the skeptics right, but I don’t know this white girl to save my life. She begins to talk and talk or maybe she hasn’t stopped talking since she arrived on my beach, but soon I’ll have to get back inside to my cubicle where chaos breathes but I can’t even enjoy my burrito in peace.

Wish she was a Country Music Radio Station, but I cannot turn her off. I’m nodding, getting the gist of what she’s saying, but really trying to keep the sun from wilting the tomatoes in my burrito and turning my guacamole brown. She’s saying something about being a newlywed as she glances at the diamond ring on her finger. I could tell that one cost more than a dollar. That one’s expensive and heavy. Big hands for a woman, with long skinny arms attached. Only things on her that look malnourished are those arms. Jeans, faded, almost dirty to her knees as if someone’s been dragging himself on her lap. Low cut waist that scoot down in the back to her butt line making her white, tank top with stretch sleeves seem shorter than it is above all that skin. Nice warm weather, but she’s not used to it. Ugly tattoo of a big moon, the size of a baseball on a whale tail where she won’t have to worry about gravity and wrinkles when she’s forty. Four beans represent eyes, nose and

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mouth on her tattoo. Still talking. Something about not wanting to intrude.

“I’m a newlywed. Just got married.”

“I know what a newlywed is.” Damn! If I look that stupid, why is she talking to me?

“I used to eat that all the time before I got married. But I had to go on a diet to fit into my dress. Now I’m sticking with it.

You certainly don’t have that problem, though.” Hilfiger back up on my head. Well bless her heart. I’m flattered. She serious with that backhanded compliment? Her marriage is already in trouble. She’s pale but with dark red hair The sun cannot be her friend. That’s why the moon is sinking down to her ass. Smelly Moon is a good title for a Country Music song. I already know her lyrics. She’s too young to be married. Looks about mid twenties with a big nose and a high forehead, crease-free, like it’s been injected with Botox.

“Congratulations. When did you get married?”

“Few days ago. August 10th in San Francisco.”

“That’s last week. Well good for you. No honeymoon?”

“I’m on my honeymoon. I’m taking a break.” Strangest thing I’ve ever heard. He must be an Olympian. Should I be feeling special? Something’s bothering her, obviously.

“You probably need some sunscreen out here.”

“Why? You don’t.”

“Well that’s because the sun is my friend.” She laughs but there’s labor in it. It’s a forced laugh, hoarse, as if she’s been smoking for years. It screws up her face even though she opens her mouth wide. Sounds like she’s coughing up blood. Laugh began genuine, though, but ended up a lie. She has a good dentist, or must have worn retainers growing up. Teeth too straight and white but it looks like she needs to leave the dentist alone and maybe see someone for upstairs.

“I don’t really love him. Not the way I should. I mean I love him but, Christ! This is so screwed up! I just tied up my life for about twenty years, and all because, shit! I don’t even know anymore.” There--there, it’s just your manic depression out of whack. We all get neuroses at some point in life. We’ll see if we can’t increase the dose of your Prozac. Is that what she expects me to say? And about that four-letter word that women use too much.

Are you kidding me? Why is she telling me this stuff? No sympathy from me! Burrito’s gone but I only enjoyed half of it--the half I ate by myself. Glad it’s gone because this mess is too heavy to accompany my burrito anyway. I pop open my can of Coke. It

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startles her, makes her glance around. Tide rolling in but we’re fine.

Got a ways to go to reach us up on this sand. She looks at me. Are those tears in her eyes? Real tears, or has she been staring at the sun? White girls and tears. Come on! I’m on my lunch break here.

There is no way I’m offering her anything, not even a sip of my Coke. Where’s her lunch? She’s bringing attention to me--to us, that I don’t want. Let’s see. If I were my cell phone, where would I be?

In my desk at work, that’s where I’d be. Damn!

“You shouldn’t have gotten married then. No offense, but you look kinda young.” Nice ring though. Red nail polish with rectangular shaped nails also on her fingers. Hands are too big and red for my taste. Then there’s her color. White girl? White girl with red hair and big hands on malnourished limbs? White girl with tattoo and a big nose? Nice smile, though. But tears, in broad daylight? People will think I beat her.

“No shit! You don’t look that much older.” She pads the corners of her eyes with the tip of her index as if she’s dusting for mascara. I don’t even have a napkin to offer her, but that’s all I’d be offering if I had one. Nice to hear her swear.

“Why did you then?” Hurry up and leave me to what’s left of my lunch in peace, Girl. Please?

“Ball was rolling. Everyone thought I should. And he asked me to.”

“All of the above, huh?”

“And then some. Maybe I should have turned him down.”

There she goes still thinking she is a prize that he won.

“Maybe.”

“You married?”

“You see any ring on my finger? All right, once. That’s why I’m eating burritos for lunch—alone.” Big-ass hint. Sun feels nice. Coke is a little tepid.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to intrude. You were the only one really enjoying the weather out here, so I thought I’d join you, if you don’t mind.”

“It’s alright. We can share the sun, but I got dibs on the moon the minute the tide starts rolling in.” Big-ass smile from her.

She smiles nice. I want those teeth she has or a set just like it. Bet you they would look better in my mouth.

“Besides, looked like you needed someone to talk to.” Big smile from me.

“You can still get out. Get it annulled or get a lawyer or something. Twenty years is a long time.”

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“I can’t. It’s too embarrassing. He already gave me too much.”

“Yeah. The ring? Nice diamond.”

“Thanks.”

“Just give it back.”

“I can’t. Then I’d have to give back everything, his hospitality, a house--place to live, a car to drive, his family whose been nice to me, and his name. He even paid for my mother and aunt to fly out to the wedding. They had never even been to San Francisco.”

“What did you give him?”

“Nothing.” I could tell she’s scanning the horizon, thinking about that one.

“Ennnnh!!!! Wrong answer! Her marriage is definitely beached on the runway. Love, her four-letter word, is the right answer.

“Well, you must have given him something, too.” Little beads of sweat on her forehead from all that thick red hair. She must be thirsty as hell, parched. Waves are crashing hard and loud under the pier. Someone’s walking a fucking dog on my beach at high noon.

“I had nothing to give him.” Like hell. How about your red pussy, White Girl?

“Sure you did. What about love?”

“Oh, love. If that’s what you want to call it.” Ding, ding, ding, ding! Right answer even if I had to help her get there. And she’s the prize?

“That’s why some people live together first.”

“We did. But it was short, about four months.”

“Quick love, then. Young love, too. Well you’ve got a fifty-fifty chance, unless well that’s none of my business.”

“No it’s okay. Unless what?”

“Unless you’re pregnant. Is that it?” There goes my lunch.

“No. Ha, ha. You’re funny.” That laugh wasn’t genuine.

She is really struggling. She needs to bury her salmon feet in the sand like I did. Hide them from the sun to keep them cool. I suppose her toes are too pretty. She pulls her knees up in the sand and hugs them instead. I give her time. Take all the time she needs.

I can put in some overtime today, anyway. My boss should understand that it’s this sun and a troubled white girl.

“That’s something I will have to give him and his family though. I know it.”

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“What? Children?” Nods, and I watch the red hair.

“That a problem?”

“Big problem.”

“How come?”

“I don’t want kids.”

“And he doesn’t know that?”

“Not really.” Shakes her head like she’s suddenly aware of the lies she’s been telling him.

“The ball is still rolling then.” I don’t tell her that the longer she keeps it rolling, the faster it will roll, pick up speed until she’s about fifty. Perhaps she won’t understand.

“Wish I could make it stop.” Her tone has something dire about it. People walking along the beach in front of us raise their eyebrows. Some of the bold ones dangling shoes in their hands smile at us as if we’re celebrities, or an exotic picture that belong on the cover of National Geographic. I don’t care. She doesn’t either. I just know that those are real tears.

“I’m sure he’s a nice guy and his family is fun and stuff.”

Man, I don’t even know this sucker who must have s-i-m-p-l-e stamped on his forehead if he couldn’t see this coming.

“He is. They are. And that’s what makes it so hard. It would have been so much easier if his family wasn’t in the picture.”

“Where’d you move here from?”

“East Coast.”

“Yeah, you said that. What state?”

“Boston.” Mind drifting.

“That’s not a state.”

“That was a test. You passed.” Neurotic humor, too. She remembers the sun and shows it her face. Eyes closed. Lids naked to makeup. Red hair coarse but short, flops back as if her neck’s on the sink at a Hair Salon. Green bruise on her neck under the hair.

No. That can’t be right. Hickey? She’s on her Honeymoon. Guess anything goes.

“Brrr! Never been to Boston. I like warm weather myself.

I could never deal with snow. It’s not in my makeup.”

“You never know. People adapt.”

Well there you go white girl. Just write me a check and be on your merry way. My session here is over. She doesn’t need me.

“You know how to surf?”

“The Net?” “No. Out there,” she points.

“Nope.”

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“I know how to ski. I was on my ski team in high school.

Haven’t skied in years, though.”

“Nope. I haven’t done that either.”

“I’d like to surf. It’s probably like skiing only on waves.”

Her big hands undulate to show what she means by skiing on the water, and the sun hit that ring. Hands moving too fast for me, though. I’d fall on my ass. She would, too, even with hands that big.

Another bruise peeping out from under her sleeve at the back of her skinny arm, turning purple because it’s pissed at the sun.

“Honeymoon can’t be all that bad, at least not for him.”

“It’s better now.” No you don’t White girl with tears.

Don’t even get me involved in your mess. Work it out.

“Maybe this is your test. Just bare with him. It’ll work out.”

“Thank you. You don’t know how it helps to hear you say that.” Silence is awkward afterwards because she doesn’t really mean that. She’s just being polite. Ocean’s bare. No one’s riding boards out there. Waves are deafening but don’t seem all that scary when they roll up on the sand as white froth. Waves remind me of a fluffy dog, big-ass bark but no bite.

“Well hope everything works out.” And I’m about to climb off my shoes because, well, my ass hurts and I can’t afford to ruin this pair sitting on them longer than my lunch break allows.

“How come you’re divorced?” Now wait a minute. Give me a break! A black man under the sun on his lunch break shouldn’t be under duress, too. This is supposed to be my time at the beach. If I could be anything or anywhere right now I’d want to be one of the fucking seagulls skimming the pier and the waves.

“Make a long story short, irreconcilable differences in the end.”

“What? I thought that only happened in movies.”

“Yeah? Well I thought this only happened in movies.”

“Sorry. I’m intruding again.”

“It’s okay.” Damn this white girl.

“Wonder if there’s a vending machine around here?” Jesus Christ! If I were a can of coke and I didn’t want my owner sharing me with anyone, what would I do? Become a smoker and dump my cigarette butt inside the can. That’s what I’d do.

“You can have a sip of coke if you don’t mind my germs.”

“Really?” Surprise is as fake as her toe rings.

“As long as you don’t mind my germs.”

“Germs are good. If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll get sick and he won’t want me again.” Cop-out! But back to her again. I certainly

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didn’t take long. It’s always about the White girl with tears.

“Well, my lunch break’s about over.” Thirst quenched.

Hands me back my coke and stretches her legs out in the sand.

Crosses them, wiggling her toes. People see that they think we’re flirting, fraternizing, courting, newlyweds. Left a film of lip-gloss on my can. Coke taste like lavender coke now. Hell, she got a ring in the deal. Shit! Wait a minute. Where’s her ring? I don’t see it on her finger now. Lost? When did she take it off?

“I think it’s easier for men to get married.” If I were a white boy who was tired of skipping to Tijuana on weekends to have a good time and this girl fell into my lap, what would I be doing right now? Exchanging wrong digits and wrong email addresses then hauling ass away from this chick.

“Why is that?”

“They don’t go through as many changes. They have the same friends, same habits and we have to change.” Sun lighting her up as she relaxes, leaned back, stiff-armed, palms spread out on the sand. Even with her big nose she’s attracting attention like an exotic billboard.

“That’s no fun. You all can make friends, new friends. Lots of newlyweds out there you can meet, mingle with.” She has twenty years to get started. Hmm. If I were a wedding ring that didn’t want to be worn, where would I be? This white girl appeared on my beach, under my sun, with no purse and no lunch, looking for therapy. And she’s getting it, free. But it’s costing me my lunch break.

“I don’t like his friends.”

“Oh yeah. Tell him to get rid of them.”

“Right on. I can’t do that!”

“They like you?”

“I don’t know. He’s not really the jealous type, but I think they have to get his permission to like me.” Dude might not be so bad. He can probably sense right off that his new wife isn’t completely sold on him. I give him some credit anyhow. I’ll laugh at him later when I’m in my cubicle shuffling papers.

“He’ll get past that. It’s the newlywed jitters. Every young newlywed has them.”

“Did you have them?”

“You’ll have to ask my ex.” Big, bright smile like she’s contemplating the glamour of being an ex. Sympathy smile is what ends up on her face under that nose when the thought passes. Still, white teeth are fetching and make people who stroll past us believe

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she’s smiling at them, so they smile back.

“I could talk to you all day. You’re nice to talk to. Thank you so much.” Compliments? What else is she after? Where’s the moon at? It’s taking an awful long- ass time to show up.

“Well, I have to get back. Good luck with everything. Nice chatting with you.” Please. Who am I kidding? I’m not going anywhere.

“I don’t think I want to go through with this. I don’t think I want to be married to him.” If I were a husband who was about to get dumped on his Honeymoon, where would I be? Burrito feels like it’s a thick burning cigar lodged in my stomach about to come up whole because I ate it too fast. I feel sad for her because her ball is gathering speed. Removing her ring doesn’t even begin to slow it down.

“Give him a chance. You’ll be fine.” Still can’t believe I’m supporting this sucker and I don’t even know him from Adam.

Quiet from her because she finally stopped talking. She has a lot to think about. I hear footsteps behind us like a distant jogger getting close. No. Someone running heavy, galloping fast, the kind of mad run you hear on sand when lifeguards are sprinting to save a life.

She is silent, still thinking. I turn around in time so see this big white motherfucker about to pounce, but not before he yells out “PUTA!”

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Mother’s Bark Listen when I talk.

Quit shaking your head.

Did I say to sit?

Get up off them legs!

Stay off the floorboard!

I just mop the floorJust stay on the mat.

Don’t walk out that door!

Come back up them stairs!

I’m locking this door.

Okay, stay outsideBeen through this before.

How’d you get back here?

Didn’t I lock both doors?

Look at all that mud.

More prints on my floor.

Back out on that porch!

This is no time to play.

What’s that in your mouth?

Come back here I say!

Bring that here to me!

You’re so damn sneaky.

Look, open them teeth.

Let go my panty!

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Jaclyn Dwyer

Holding on to Childhood “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”

The Girl FUCK! I don’t even like the kid. Can’t stand the kid. But the truth is, I feel bad for the kid. Like I wanna take off my clothes and let him look at me, just so he can get used to the idea of being around girls, maybe let him touch me a little, just so he knows what skin feels like. Just to get used to it. Then maybe he won’t freak out every time some girl brushes against him in the hall and he gets a boner right there. Right there! And the kids won’t laugh and pick on him and then I won’t have to follow him around, baby-sitting a twelve year old just to make sure he doesn’t get beat up every goddamn day. Then I think, maybe that would just mess him up more, like he’ll think we’re all freaks, even though we are. But we can’t have him thinking that. Gotta keep the kid normal, that’s what mom says. So she signs him up for baseball. Of all things, baseball.

Such a sad sport. It makes me wanna fucking cry, like Field of Dreams having a catch with dad in the backyard post 9/11 Yankees kind of sad. It’s too much of a failed metaphor for America.

The Kid The best way to explain the situation with the kid is like this: the whole world is divided into dog people and cat people. The dog people seem to always have the upper hand and always know where they are going and what they are doing and the cat people are just sort of strung along trying to keep their heads above water, and you can’t help being who you are. It’s like your born one way or another and if you’re a cat person stuck in a world of dog people, well, you’re just fucked. That’s pretty much the circumstances of the kid.

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The Girl I want to tell you this, but it’s not my story. It has nothing to do with me really, but still I have to go on because no one else will.

I have never been a pretty girl. It’s not that I’m ugly or unattractive. Boys like me. In fact, many boys like me, and the fathers at games like these, well. . . It’s just that I’m not pretty in that ordinary enviable way. I’m the sexy smart girl. The girl you want to fuck. The girl you picture when you’re jerking off in the shower, not the girl you call up for a date to the movies, the girl who gives you clammy palms just thinking about holding her hand, the girl you spend forty five minutes inching your arm around her shoulder.

That’s not me.

I’m the girl you don’t wanna get too close to because you never know what I might say, what I might do next. Like the tattoo at the base of my neck you can only see when I pull my hair up high into a ponytail. This boy I was seeing at the time was in a band. He told me that he liked tattoos so I said, “Let’s go.” And it wasn’t even the fact that I got it right then and there that freaked him out, or that I’d chosen his initials scripted in an open heart, but that I laughed the entire time while the needle buzzed behind my head.

“Doesn’t it hurt? It’s gotta hurt,” he said. “Of course it hurts,” I said, giggling still, trying hard to keep still while my ribcage fluttered from my laughing lungs. My abdominal muscles were beginning to tighten, would be sore the next day from so much laughter. The tattoo artist took a break to switch colors for the initials BC. He scoffed, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” That right there, that’s me.

"But I didn't ask you to do it," says Salinger. "1 didn't ask for you to feel the way you do. You're influenced by an illusion. Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they're good, you believe that what they write is real. . . But the words on the page have no connection to the person who wrote them. Writers live other peoples' lives for them.”

The Boy His father spends his afternoons fantasizing about a life that will never be his. Two years in the minor leagues and that was it.

His dreams fell to the boy, and for a while he tried, but the boy just doesn’t have it. He knows this and by now the father knows it too, but he can’t say it. Neither one of them can put it into words, but

15

he’s stopped coming to the games. No one ever looked at the boy.

Now, not even him. The boy thinks this will be his last season with the team, but he said that last year and the year before. He just can’t help it coming out like this, hoping, but not quite believing that maybe this year will be different from the last. But it never is. Never.

The only reason they let him play is they’ve got this killer southpaw, 93 mph arm, and no one else wants to suit up and crouch behind that plate with these pitches being hurled at his face. This kid, he’s got it. He’s something special. People come to look at him. Two recruiters from out of state. The boy’s father got sick one day when he thought they might be watching his son and the boy missed a pitch. Bounced and hit him in the chest, and he thought his heart had stopped and there he was shaking the fence like a monkey in the zoo and mumbling to himself and while everyone else was asking, “Hey, man. Are you alright?” his dad was screaming, “Jesus Christ.

All you have to do is fucking catch the ball.” It was around that time that he stopped coming to the games.

The Girl It had to be the catcher. Everyone else I could see their faces shadowed beneath the penumbra of their visors, squinting into the sunlight, glancing in my direction, staring at the catcher squatting behind the batter. He was the only one not looking at me, the only one with his back to me. The only one whose face was completely hidden behind the mask, the only one looking out over the expanse of green fields and the tile factory beyond billowing black smoke even on a Saturday, just like me. I wondered if he too saw the neck of a giraffe, the curled trunk of an elephant, or if he only saw pollution causing him to cough. He was the only one crouching uncomfortably close to the ground while everyone else stood hunched their elbows, leaning on their knees. He even had a special glove without any fingers. As if his hands were all palm, and I wondered what it would be like holding them.

"Why have you never written about baseball?" I ask.

Salinger turns his head slowly and his sad eyes rest on me, a forlorn question mark bobbing corklike in their dark centers. He does not answer, so I chatter on.

"I can't remember Holden Caulfield ever talking about baseball - though the story takes place in December, doesn't it? He wouldn't have any reason to . . .

16

The Kid It came from the big oaf over on third base. Obese motherfucker who only threw hard because he could put his weight behind the ball and hurl it, without much direction, hard and fast.

The kid stood on the bag as the ball crossed his body and the kid wasn’t thinking. It was just an impulse, a gut reaction, animal instinct that made him reach his left hand out like that and catch the thing in his naked palm with a loud smack. But it was too late. The runner was already safe, so he lobbed the ball back to the pitcher, and it fell two feet in front of him. That’s how he knew his fingers were broken, because he couldn’t get them to bend and wrap around the ball the way he needed them to. But he didn’t complain.

He didn’t say anything. He just stood by first base hoping that no more balls came to him for the rest of the inning. And they didn’t.

“Whoa! Did you see that? He just caught that with is bare hand. Yo! Kid, Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” he said, even though he knew that he wasn’t. “It just stings a little. It’ll be fine.”

When it was his turn to hit, the kid tried to grab the bat, but he couldn’t get his fingers to bend. By now, they were purple. His whole hand was swollen and the coach noticed while he gave a few practice swings with his one good hand. “What are you doing?” he asked.

The kid tried to hide his hand, but it was so obvious that something was broken. The coach wanted to know how it happened. “That ball that I caught, I caught it with the wrong hand.”

“And you didn’t tell us that you were hurt.”

“It’s fine. I think it will be fine.”

“Kid, that’s not fine. Somebody get him some ice. Where are your parents?”

“I can still play though. Right? I can play?”

“Not like that you can’t.”

The Girl The first time I kissed a boy was in the sewer underground.

I’d raced to get a renegade hockey ball, a bright green all-weather ball that had rolled into the grate at the curb, and my skates got stuck scrambling so fast and he came in to get me out. I was

17

crouched in there, crying, bawling like some baby just because I got stuck in a pipe. My breaks pressed into the back pockets of my jeans so hard I thought they’d tear right through. My knees were squeezed so tight I thought they might snap and I couldn’t move.

Scott came in and took the ball out of my hands.

“Try to inch forward,” he said.

“I can’t,” I said, because I couldn’t. “I’m not usually like this. I mean, I don’t usually cry, it’s just.”

That’s when he kissed me, to stop me from crying, and he said, “Hey, it’s ok. I would have cried too.”

It was a lie and I knew it, but when boys lie like that, it’s not so bad. It’s better than the truth. Then he tipped me sideways and the cement scraped across my back but it was a good feeling to be moving at all and I smiled because I was finally free. My legs were suddenly loose, so we crawled out together. I took breaks every few inches or so to rub my cheeks with the backs of my hands, but when I emerged, it was obvious that I had been crying. They treated me differently after that, like I was a real girl, no longer one of the boys.

“I don't write autobiography. I'm a quiet man who wrote stories that people believe. Because they believe, they want to touch me, but I can't stand to be touched. They would have been chipping little pieces off me before I knew it, as if 1 were a statue, and pretty soon there wouldn't have been anything left of me.

That's why I chose to drop out."

The Boy A fly ball. He stood up and slid the mask off his face. Over his head it fell to the ground behind him as he followed the ball down into his mitt. A good catch. Then his eyes came up. He’d gotten turned around and was now facing the fence like every other boy on the field and he saw me right there, a foot away. My fingers were looped through the holes in the fence, my nose poked straight through the metal diamond. He wondered why someone didn’t send me away, tell me to back up. I could get hurt, my fingers smashed, my nose broken. I never thought of any of these things. Sometimes he crashed into the fence, his heavy body rattling the chains. Or if he missed an outside ball, it could crush my knuckles, warp my pretty fingers. Delicate hands. All this in only three seconds and still he noticed that my eyes were uniform blue. The exact shade of the stripes on his shirt. I was impressed.

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The Girl You want him to get hurt so that you can comfort him, but not so bad that you are unable to provide the comfort and care that he needs. You want him to get stuck in a pipe so that you can be the one to crawl in after him to fetch him out. You want him to start crying so that you can kiss away his tears, but he doesn’t even look at you. You can’t remember the last time you have been this close to a man who doesn’t turn to look at you. Not just look, but stare, thinkingly, and you know what he is thinking.

My stomach was so full of fluid it kept making noises like a boat on the water. It was embarrassing. After a while, it began to sound like pigeons cooing. Then the sound disappeared. My stomach kept gurgling, but you couldn’t hear it over the sound of the siren. An ambulance arrived for the kid. By now, both games had stopped. The boy came out, walked around the backstop to where I was standing. He leaned on the fence. “You shouldn’t be standing here, you know. It’s dangerous to be so close.”

“There’s no such thing as too close.”

“What’s going on over there? I hope nobody’s hurt.”

“Oh, shit. It’s my brother.” Shit, I shouldn’t have said shit just then. I wanted to stay and talk to him and tell him my name.

But I had to walk away. I had to go to the kid. “I should go.”

I didn’t even look back, even though I wanted to, but I swore that I could feel his eyes on my naked shoulders, burning into my skin and I tried not to sway too much, tried to forget about him as I picked up my pace and soon I was running, hauling ass to get to the kid.

“I’m fine,” he kept saying to everyone crowded around him, the coaches and paramedics who kept asking for his parents.

“I’m here,” I said. “I’m his sister. I’m with him.”

“Don’t worry, I’m fine,” he kept saying, even to me. “I don’t need you to take care of me. I’m not some baby. I’m tough. I can take it.”

“You fucking broke your hand.” Fuck, I shouldn’t have said fuck just then.

I told the paramedics that I’d take him straight home and let my parents get him to the hospital, even though the kid kept insisting that he wouldn’t go.

The other kids on the team were impressed. Somewhere in the crowd, I knew the catcher was watching me, his gear still on, the mask somewhere in the dirt of the other field. He was the only one

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in that crowd who was really seeing me for who I was. A girl he’d want to take to a movie and spend two hours sweating and thinking about holding my hand.

They say baseball is a game of inches. Getting the ball over the plate. Missing the swing. Making the catch or the steal. Finding the right boy is the same kind of thing. There are inches between your heights, closing that space with heels. Inches between your faces before that first kiss, closed by standing on tiptoe, leaning into his body pretending to fall. Letting him catch you. Holding your face up to his. Laying your arm across his two inches of the arm rest, dangling your hand over the edge, encouraging him to pick it up.

I wasn’t expecting him to call me when he said he would. I wasn’t expecting him to suggest dinner before the movie, where I’d have to sit and eat and try to hold up a conversation with a table between our bodies. I went through six outfits when usually I’m showered and dressed and out the door in ten minutes. I blow dried my hair so it was straight, flat, and calm, but when I looked in the mirror, I still looked a mess. Like it was in my skin all those men I’d been with. Like you could smell my history. I felt fake, like I could never pull this off. Like I shouldn’t even answer the door, but my brother was already there when he knocked and it was too late. I felt stupid and it was that boy’s his fault. If he hadn’t been so damn nice, I would have never tried to be something else.

I asked him when he picked me up that first time to take me to the movies, “Do you prefer dogs or cats?”

Then I said, “Did you know that if you die alone in your house, after a few days without food, your cat will start to eat you, but your dog will continue barking, trying to get help. He’ll starve before he eats you because he considers you a friend. He thinks you’re one of them, part of the pack.”

He didn’t say anything for a while. Neither one of us did.

That’s how I knew where things were going.

20

Stacy Cartledge

tramontating bleary with warmth coming to cold; watching the lights of day’s long close. the wind has no rest; the scent of wood still spices the air and the nesting sap floats like laps after high school pigskin games, pads lightly lifting, then holding me by my beaten shoulders. the leaves, now older, have gone despite the lukewarm winter; streetlamps’ light glances along branches, bald and bending of bough. the scent is deeper here, darker and secret. you cannot hear my whispering, but that does not stop the words, an image caught in palimpsest: within the woods we found our rest, a blanketing quiet pulled round ourselves, thick as wool. but tonight the insulation peels: trees carelessly cleared, construction has razed our spot of osculation.

21

couplets intervention is a word of dismemberment— extricate the soft, the feel of pleasure on burnt skin. whittle stone, carve it. the stones are used for building, the stones rough. say it honestly, without truth in your transmuted eyes— the stones become smooth slide of moss, the slip of water over burnt skin. sincerity a knife; the stones stacked, cemented. but more than this, i feel you like a prosthetic.

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ode on distance 1. hidden morning sun and clouds pink, pushed flat, straining against sky; the birthing horizon grasps at me, something animate, adamant, despite the distance. zeno’s paradox assumes a simple misapprehension—we do not move in fractions. once a girl said to me how is it that i can touch my fingers to my shoulder, but not to my elbow, half away the distance? she knew why —but she was searching beyond fulcrum.

2. the moon is beauty and now and then i can reach it, touch its discolored stain on the sky —taste the scent of dust & petals. despite touch, there is no contact between us. we are grains of empty space. once the girl said come to me. . . but i said that distance is not the constraint in this equation —it is the ability to move, the possible vectors of motion.

23

Amy Faith De Betta

The Greater East Albuquerque Co-Prosperity Sphere Johnny-Cat Comes Clean: So it’s about thirteen months ago when I’m making a delivery to some shit hole on Fourth Street where I’m always worrying about leaving the engine running even though I’m usually out of the truck, package in hand, getting the electronic signatures inside of two minutes flat. There are always at least twelve extended family members home at all times when it comes to making a delivery to Fourth Street. Half of them on disability, the other half under 9 months of age, soaked diaper and actually answering the fucking door then dialoguing with me in utter gibberish before someone over the age of 2 yells in Spanish and comes to the door to sign.

But I pull up to this place and this guy, this white guy with dyed black hair and stark white roots, maybe 33, 34… comes out from the garage pushing his bicycle next to him and says, “Delivery for Rodriguez? Felipe Rodriguez?” (All the while rubbing his nose and scratching his greasy hair, standing maybe 5 inches shorter than me.) So I should ask for some ID, but the fucking truck is running with the keys in the ignition just begging to be stolen and I mean, it’s maybe 104 degrees out and I don’t particularly care who signs for this envelope from a Pharmacy in Arkansas.

“That’s you?” I ask.

“That’s indeed who I am. All day. May I?” he asks, really politely, reaching out for the envelope so obviously stuffed with prescription vials.

I shove the electronic pad in his hand and say, “I just need you to sign. And hit enter.”

“Of course,” he says, then I start to grin when he takes the pen in his right hand, then moves it to his left and carefully writes what might be interpreted as “Flp Rod---.”

“And… ENTER. Got it. Great. Thank you,” he smiles back as I hand him the envelope.

I’m not even vaguely interested enough to watch and see if he actually enters the house. That would make me all too accountable. I pull out and catch him in the rearview getting back on his 10 speed. Felipe Rodriguez. One of maybe 35 deliveries to

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make. It was that fucking hair that was so memorable.

Not two days later I’m making a delivery up in the Heights.

Now if you don’t know Albuquerque, and I hope you don’t, the Heights are where all the money is. They’ve got mansions built into the Sandia Mountains and their biggest problems are that occasionally a bear will wander down the mountain into a sauna and take a midnight soak. They shop in Santa Fe, don’t so much as blink at the price of a photograph of the same goddamned mountain they have in the back yard which is now on a museum wall selling for $1700 in a cut rate frame and, of course, they wear that fucking turquoise jewelry, even the men. Big rings. Pay fortunes for what the American Indians sell for $15 downtown. Lexis, Hummers, Jags… this is no cars-on-blocks territory and never any chicken wire kind of living. You say the Heights, and people say “Wow.” I pull up to this house that truthfully I think is actually a model home for new homes going up. A good 3 stories with unfathomable windows and you can of course see right through the house into the mountain range behind it. There’s a high surrounding wall decorated in Candelabras already set on it ready to be lit.

And what the fuck do you know? There’s Felipe Rodriguez with his bike literally parked in the rose bushes next to the front door. He’s sitting there typing on a laptop, and I swear he’s wearing the same “Icky and the Yucks” t-shirt he was wearing when I met the left-right-handed fucker on Fourth Street. I turn off the truck and step out, looking at the ground. Two envelopes in hand addressed to “Jonas Showalter” and he stands up. Seeing me from a distance he says, “Jonas Showalter. Delivery for me, I hope? I’ve been waiting all day… You should really…” And, recognizing me, his fucking face drops.

“Well I’m just glad you made it safely.” He says, making a fast recovery. “There’s a monsoon coming, I see. I’ll just sign for that…” he says, looking down, his white roots all stark against the black edges.

So realizing what the fuck is going on here I ask him for his ID, and goddamn if the guy doesn’t open his chain wallet, sift through about a dozen cards, and hand me a state license issued to Jonas Showalter.

“Good security measure,” he says. “Can’t be too safe.” He’s rocking back on his heels, looking everywhere but at me.

“Strangest thing.” I say, looking him dead in the eye. “I

25

could swear I know you. Thought your name was Felipe something…”

“No, sir, indeed it is not. Jonas Showalter. Says so right there. Am I going to have to call your Supervisor?” he asks, with this sudden burst of confidence.

“Tell you what, I’ll go back to my truck and get the cell.

You can go ahead and call him on it…”

So of course, as I head back to the truck, he scrambles for his bike and takes off peddling like a second grader down a gravel driveway and actually makes a left to turn uphill. Amusing. Now, understand, my interest was merely to kill a little time. The cell wasn’t charged. It never is. I was more interested in knowing what the hell I was going to pull out of my hat next. I sign for the delivery myself and get back to work.

After my shift I open the envelopes and one is a bottle of 90 Vicodins and the other a bottle of 120 Fioricet with Codeine. I don’t particularly care for those drugs myself.

Never understood why you’d dull it down when you can speed it the fuck up, but the deliveries are worth something without a doubt. Maybe a few favors. Car repairs maybe… or maybe I’ll just see if I can get a trade for more packets of my own drug of choice.

Next day I’m making a delivery to “Evelyn Brice” who’s living in one of those cut rate apartments at Pueblo Villa. Looks cool from the outside, but they’re all run down inside and every other mutherfucker has pit bulls in their courtyards. Plural. No one ever has just one pit bull. I walk up the steps to her place and knock on the door and within an instant you hear a dog bark and the door flies open like I’m Ed McMahon with her Clearing House Check.

I’m stunned for a second.

She’s gorgeous. Every hair in place pulled back into this elaborate twist with short straight bangs and huge grey eyes. Pink lips, a short red dress and heels, and it’s only 9:30 AM. I’m thinking maybe she’s a stripper, but the way she greets me, melting at the door, smiling at me in earnest and carefully articulating to this huge red heeler, “Quiet. It’s okay, doll face. I’m sorry for the barking.

She’s just protective.”

“No, no problem. I have a delivery for Evelyn Brice.”

“Evie. Everyone calls me Evie. I didn’t expect you so early,” she says, with no reach for the package.

“Yeah, yeah, strange route this morning, can you just sign here, please?”

“Certainly,” she says, taking the pad gently from my hands

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and carefully writing her name in this elaborate script before handing it back to me.”

“And just press ENTER for me,” I say, handing over her envelope.

“I’m so sorry… where’s the enter button?”

“Right there,” I say, pointing to it.

As she carefully presses it, looking genuinely confused by the electronic pad, Thee Felipe Rodriguez comes walking behind her yelling something to her about toilet paper. Stops. Looks directly at me and dodges out of sight. I mean, he dives. Literally. For the rug.

Face first like he’s sliding into home base. She smiles, tilts her head against the doorframe, tentatively takes the envelope and says, “Thank you very much” in this calm, measured speech.

“Oh, listen. Before I go, I think I have something for you, Evie.” I reach into my pocket while she stands there dead still and relaxed, and I hand her the two bottles for Jonas Showalter. “There are a few missing, but I think I can make it up to you, if you’ll give me the chance. And send Felipe my regards.” I smile back at her.

“I’ll do just that,” she says, closing the door gently. A chorus of “Oh Fuck!” and “God no!” comes from “Felipe,” who’s obviously throwing an apoplectic fit inside. She’s not yelling though. Whoever she is. And at the time I think she’s not yelling because she’s just fallen that far. Doesn’t have it in her. But now I know, she wasn’t yelling because… being busted would have been kind of a relief.

Crossing the finish line.

I get back in the van, snort the remains of my last packet and hallucinate falling into her dead blue eyes, like a pool of water with an undertow, but breathing in the water, breathing normally.

Swimming, looking for something. No idea what I’m looking for but knowing there’s something in there I’m supposed to retrieve to keep and have, or maybe to return…

Belle’s Song I like this idea a lot. It’s tightly woven and this guy John, he’s got what Evie would call my “by in.” He’s got the perfect job to get our orders faster, smoother, and without all the worry. Evie had to use her own credit card to get her Fioricet after Skunk screwed it all up. Broke the rotation. I was supposed to be at the next house to accept the delivery, but he simply didn’t mention it, got cocky and decided to do it himself. He’s lucky he’s not in jail. We’re all lucky.

27

So before we really turn this into a business, I want everyone to get in the car and drive the hour and a half with me to the town of Chimayo. This is still relatively off the map.

We’re going to pay our respect in the Church where there was a sacred crucifix stolen in the 1800s. Being Mexican, the artwork is overpowering, it’s spiritually so vivid and striking. So this cross I mentioned… it simply reappears some years later, beneath the Church, literally in the ground as if it had returned itself. As if it had been called home like the very hand of God had picked it up and placed it back in its rightful place.

So every Easter Sunday it becomes this pilgrimage ground.

Literally a thousand people ditch their cars and walk on foot to Chimayo for one sole purpose: to retrieve the soil that the Church is built on. A sandwich bag, a paper bag, just a few shovels of this dirt that’s said to heal the ailing, to do anything really. The rest of the year, though, it’s got trinket shops and some good Mexican food.

You can buy spices off the street sellers and wander in and out of a few local artist galleries. Cars don’t go through the town, or if they do, it’s rare. You just sort of park at this strange area near a brook with the Stonehenge version of huge crosses erected in a line… and walk through the grottos uphill to the Church.

The first time I took them, Evie was just mesmerized with the grottos where people light candles and leave tokens of their prayers. This is more like the dying ground for desperate pleas.

People take stones from the brook and write on them in marker, paint on them… whatever… Prayers like “Dear Lord, King of all Kings, my son has taken ill and only your strength and glory can save him. I beg you to save Pedro” plus the date and a first name, or no name at all. One of the grottos has nothing but tiny baby shoes, some new, some looking very old. At other grottos it’s more traditional to leave paper, notes, prayer cards, funeral cards.

Now I’m of Mexican heritage and proud to be but truth be told, it’s not a place for a bunch of non-Spanish-speaking white people to be roaming at night. For every faithful person out there, there are three opportunists to steal your car and not all these residents or church caretakers speak English so they won’t be able to help you when you’re stranded. I’ve heard some pretty bad stories about belongings, cars, the ring on your finger, being robbed from you at night and so I insist we all go together since I know many of the locals very well and I’m the only one that can speak Spanish among us.

The car ride is a fucking thrill. We’re passing these plateaus

28

in the desert, the sort of thing you might take for granted if you were born here but John says, “Look! that looks like the mountain from Close Encounters!” Evie immediately goes into her purse for a pill, holds it in her teeth and sprays sun block on the shoulder against the passenger side window. Says, “Water, please,” with the pill still clenched between her teeth.

Skunk hands her a Pabst and immediately launches into a speech on how unconstitutional Income Tax is which is mildly amusing considering the fact every job he takes is under the table.

Now I’ve got his head between the seats and this is the worst because John is a new audience, he really feels that he can enlighten Johnny-Cat… make a fucking difference.

“Wait, before you do this,” I say. “I have a perfectly good high going here and I want you to consider that before I seek any sort of revenge with LOUD noises” knowing full well that the louder I am, the more a meth addict will scratch himself like there’s something alien on the inside.

“You simply wouldn’t do that,” he says. “Not only would that disturb your own comfort but you’re a fucked up zealot who will later, after this bizarre trip, decide to turn the other cheek. So shut up and operate the vehicle while I speak candidly with John here. You’d like to speak candidly, would you not, John?” he asks, putting a hand on John’s shoulder.

“Yeah, sure, but can we speak candidly without your face in mine? It creeps me out and you need a mint or twelve.”

Evie cracks up in the background, as do I, and Skunk simply fails to hear the constructive criticism.

“I imagine someone has something infinitely more important to discuss here…” Skunk says, crossing his arms like the proverbial five year old he is and looking out the window as if to say, “Too Late. Now I’m not sharing my wealth of knowledge. Now you’ll never know who the third shooter was.”

“I stole a dog once,” Evie announces, rather nonchalantly, sipping the beer and passing it to me.

I almost spit it out but manage just to cough a lot and finally ask, “Your dog is stolen?”

“Oh no, no, not … I came by her honest. When I was in the… tenth grade, I stole a dog. An ex-boyfriend’s dog. Lured it into my car all stealth like, headlights off. Sasha… I think it was named.

Stinky dog. Nice pooch. All mottled though.”

“What prompted that?” Johnny-Cat asks, genuinely interested.

29

“Oh, he broke my fuckin heart. The guy, not the dog. I was crazy about him in the sort of way only a highschooler could be. In fact… I think I honestly loved him,” she says, kind of tapering off… going back there, like she does. “But he kept badgering me to sleep with him and in my mind, this was honest-to-God true love, this wasn’t just hormones and I wasn’t thinking on the same level he was. Anyway, it was some kind of sheep dog, I think. And I stole it.”

“There are numerous breeds of sheep dogs, Evie. If you’re going to tell a story know the facts. What kind of sheep dog?”

“Are you judging at the Westminster, jackass? Let her tell the story,” I tell him, staring right at him in the rearview and passing the beer back to Evie, who snaps it just in time to keep Skunk from grabbing it.

“I don’t know, the big kind where you can’t see its eyes but that’s good because you just know they’re running, so you wonder how the thing sees at all or if it’s just resigned itself to be blind with gooey eyes. And he lived in this really fucked up depressing house that lent itself to his whole persona of punk-as-fuck and rebellious and shit.

“Historical house. It overlooked the Long Island Sound and his parents had all this money but they were so fuckin concerned with the electrical bill, or maybe the conservation of energy… who fuckin knows… so it was always pitch black in there. No lights in any room where no one was sitting, not even a porch light. Anyway, not the point. The point is, at some point, it had come to my acute attention that he was fucking this bald headed chick from another school district. Her name was Kristie. I hate that name to this day.

She looked a lot like Sinead O’Connor, truthfully. I mean, she was beautiful—in retrospect, though I wouldn’t have admitted that at the time. Really pretty girl. My same age, probably, and I just loved him so much that I ignored it.”

I crack up and ask, “Because you loved him? This sounds like a bad talk show.”

“Yeah, it really does, doesn’t it?” she says, genuinely laughing at herself. “But when you’re that age, you think so fuckin much of yourself. I mean, you think, it’ll blow over. You’re so amazing… this can’t last… surely he’ll see how wonderful you are… or something. I don’t know, but at the time, it really made sense to me.”

“Textbook,” Skunk mutters before cranking down the window and spitting out it.

“Nice. That’s really classy,” I tell him.

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“No, not actually,” she says. “It WAS more complex then that. Someone had to screw him, and it wasn’t going to be me for a variety of reasons.”

“Also textbook,” he mumbles, before Johnny-Cat turns almost entirely around to listen to her and, I suspect, give him a look. “Let her speak,” Johnny-Cat says.

“Did you kill it? You didn’t kill it, did you?” I ask her.

“Oh, God no, Belle. God no. Nothing like that. You just have to understand, he loved this fucking dog. I loved him, and he loved this fucking dog. I mean, I get it, I love my dog, too… but you have to understand. Lighter, please?” she interjects, mumbling her last words like the cigarette is already in her mouth just waiting. I press the lighter in and she says, “He just plain ol’ quit calling. Like high school boys do. Or Skunk, for that matter.”

“Fuck yourself.”

“Can’t hear you. I don’t speak Pig,” she says as the lighter pops out and Johnny holds it for her smoke.

“Thanks. He stops calling and he changes his daily route in the hallways… like a complete pussy. Stops answering the phone.

Oh and this was almost before the semester was over so he wouldn’t even have any classes with me, by the way. Stopped hanging out where he used to… the whole nine yards of going MIA on a person and I vaguely recall this final phone conversation where he was really weird and distant and apathetic and bored and all that shit you do to really hurt someone. And I couldn’t so much as bring myself to ask him why, because I had actual pride back then.”

“But not so much pride that you wouldn’t steal his dog?”

Skunk asks, more of a commentary, really.

“I think you’re missing the big picture, Stink.” I interject.

“She stole it so…”

“So he’d see how fucking much it hurt to lose something you cared about so desperately,” she says, exhaling smoke rings. “So that he’d pine. He’d cry. Meanwhile, the dog was in my backyard getting two squares a day, and it was summer, really lovely out… I even bathed it. Cut its stupid-looking bangs so it could see for a change. Tummy rubs, fetch. All that cool dog stuff. Kept her for one week and one day, just long enough to take all his hope, and then returned Sasha unharmed, right back inside his parents’ gate.”

“But he got to feel better,” Johnny-Cat says. “You got the heart break and he got his dog back?”

“You should’ve sent it home with three legs,” Skunk says in this disinterested tone, still pissed that he hasn’t told some 20-minute

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story on the last days in the bunker and what REALLY happened.

“Surely you of all people can understand, Skunk. I was just being self-righteous. I thought it was enough to show him lament. I thought it was big of me to return it to him.”

“Well that was a very boring petty theft tale. Thanks for that, Evie,” he says. And Johnny-Cat still stays turned around in the seat.

“It wasn’t that self-righteous. It was big of you,” Johnny says, his voice getting quieter. Then he whips back around and pats himself down for a packet.

Some hour and a half later we turn down this single lane dirt road to the parking area. I turn off the car and turn around to Skunk, and tell him, “Listen. This is a place of worship. Every inch of sidewalk these people consider scared. People travel hundreds of miles to see what I can show you, but you have to try and act like a normal person, Skunk. Be quiet, keep your voice down, and be respectful. If you don’t want to go into an area, then just don’t go in, but don’t come in and disrespect everyone who believes. I fucking mean it.”

“And?” Skunk demands.

“And then we see Marcos. We get what we came for and we split.”

“Yes, mother,” he snarls back. “Why are you directing this little soliloquy at me anyway? She’s the one strung out on pills, he’s on Coke, and you’re high fer chrisskakes!”

“Okay, Lord’s name in vain. If you have any ‘goddamns’ or ‘kee-ristes’ to get out, kindly do it NOW, in the car. Not in front of 80 year-old women,” I say, increasingly impatient.

“I’ll keep an eye on it, Belle,” Evie says, gathering her purse and slipping off her heels for flats. “This is a really bad outfit. Belle.

Belle,” she says, regaining herself. She reaches out and touches the back of my hair, “WE respect what you’re doing, even if we’re not 100% on what it is we’re doing.” Then raising her voice and becoming militant, “Each of us will speak in whispers and lay low.

You will not regret bringing us here. We thank you.” Silence for two seconds before Skunk starts scratching his hair like wild and she adds, “It’s hot in here, let’s get out already.”

We walk the hundred feet to the first grottos with Evie walking beside me, John just slightly hanging back and Skunk stopping every few yards to take it in. He’s quiet though.

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“Grab a rock, Evie,” I tell her. “Look for rocks, everyone…” and without questioning me, Evie spots a pile and asks, “What sort of size? Like pebbles or like this?”

“That size. That’s good,” I tell her, and we pick out four rocks smooth enough to write on. I lead them up to the first grotto where fifty other rocks lie and Johnny and Evie step forward to read them.

“You think I can reach the brook from here?” Skunk asks, ready to pitch his stone over seven visitors’ heads. He’s not kidding either. Evie turns directly around, takes him by the wrist and leads him to the stone benches. She goes into her purse and pulls out a handful of sharpies, which wouldn’t surprise anyone that knew her.

She hands them out and tells him to write his prayer on it like a good boy and the fucking moment he starts in with prayer being a waste of time and potential energy, she tells him very sharply that he should at least shut the fuck up while she does it.

I write on mine, “Jesus Lord, please protect my mother whose life has been so hard and please forgive me my endless sins. I am a thief.”

John writes on his, “Thanks for having us.”

Evie writes, “We know no other way. Please let Patrick be there with you. Tell him I still love him.” Adds a heart and a scribbled signature.

Skunk writes, “This sucks.” And Evie quickly encourages him to see if he can make the rock skip in the brook, which he thinks over, and decides to do, turning around to add, “Wow. These are truly charming vestiges of New Mexico’s gilded age.”

We pile the rocks among the others. I light a candle and we head up the hill to the actual Church. The Church itself is humbling but not just in that way that all Churches are. Mexican art celebrates Catholicism in a way that other cultures fail you. The Saints are always depicted in murals or tile, and our Lady of Guadalupe, your Virgin Mary, is held in the highest esteem. Her face always smiles, forgives… loves you. She is not so holy that she will not hear your prayers. All crucifixes transfix the onlooker not solely on his suffering, but on the beauty of the hundred hours of labor that went into carving him of wood. It’s as if to not just say, “He died for your sins,” but more so to say, “Look at how the simplest person has carved this, after another minimum wage 12hour shift, because they believe.”

I lead them through and off to the side corridor, which would be cramped if we weren’t all alone. There’s only one woman

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in there, maybe 65, 70, on her knees at a shrine. She’s crying, quietly muttering a prayer. You don’t have to speak Spanish to know that she’s lamenting a death. Thousands of plastic rosaries have been left. The walls are covered in prayers and photographs of all kinds. Some children, some family pictures, others photos of young men in military uniforms stating when they served and died.

Saints are in makeshift grottos, dolls, baby slippers, and flowers left everywhere. There’s a single wooden bench where Skunk sits down, and I turn my head just slow enough to miss his snorting Meth out of a baggy, sitting there, with the Spanish woman not eight feet away swaying on her knees.

“There,” I point out to John, showing him where people tend to cluster prayers for the soldiers killed in Iraq. He gazes over the wall awhile, reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a bunch of newspaper clippings. One of them has the word “Riscorla” highlighted on it. He tucks it into the other pictures and asks Skunk if he wants to wait outside. I lead Evie into the chamber in the back, a room maybe 5 by 4 feet with a hole in the ground, dug through the 30” of adobe floor. There are two small shovels left in the dirt and I reach in first and say, “We need something to pour the dirt into. Give me one of the bags.”

She leans closer to me and whispers, wide-eyed and interested, “Belle, why do we want dirt?”

“Because it has power. It’s the soil they found the cross in.

It’s sacred, Evie.” I tell her, pouring some over her hand. She stares back at me silently for what may be 10 seconds, then reaches very quickly into her purse and pours out a prescription bottle into a pocket in her purse. She holds out the empty bottle of cherished pills and says, “Will this be okay?”

I smile at her and we fill the bottle together. She puts the lid back on and slides it into her purse again. “Thank you, Belle,” she whispers, and we both emerge back into the sunlight where Skunk is telling John about Roswell and area 51. John looks endlessly relieved to see us and puts his arm around my waist. “This is really beautiful,” he says. I never would have known to come here. Up the hill more?” he asks, as he guides me that way, like he can smell our hookup.

“You go,” I tell him. “He’ll be sitting out front of his gallery, always sitting there, always in a red shirt. Look at his art, compliment him a lot. Ask him questions, he loves discussing his work. He’s incredible, anyway. I’ll be there very soon. And Johnny, please, just leave Skunk outside if he can’t act like a human for 9

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minutes.” They start up the adobe path, sunglasses all on, looking too obvious. I head back around the Church to where you bury your Milagros, drop to my knees in this sea of silver charms, and put one in for each of us. Unification makes our prayers stronger. One for my mother’s leg, one for my back, one for Skunk’s brain, one for Evie’s heart, and because I barely know John, I bury a Sacred heart in his name so that he can at least have peace of the spirit. The sun is searing and reflecting off the bits of silver Milagros reemerging after rains and winds and tons of visitors. It looks like the night sky in contrast to the desert sun.

I light up a roach and inhale a few deep puffs. There are no police here. There’s no particular interest in me here, other than the fact that I’m escorting three gringos on a pilgrimage for both forgiveness and drugs. I say a prayer to Our Lady and pay it all forward. Feel smooth, relaxed, excited to see Marcos again.

And by the time I walk up the hill, as expected, Evie is in deep conversation with Marcos, and he’s smiling like he’s never seen a woman before. Her glasses are pushed up into her hair so he can look into her grey eyes, linger there like all men seem to do. Skunk is already at a roadside stand across from Marcos’ gallery buying chili ripe pistachios, each wrapped in seal-locked bags, proving, once again, that he’s always good for something.

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Sarah Bowman

The Oak Spirit For Niall By halves we cannot live.

—Edwin Muir I. The years without summer to the cold wasps slow and the world barely old seems so white at dusk the solstice turns to sleet newly on this place meadow salt leaches in to fog the dampened tree flesh through a cavern of roots the wind comes in through the marsh’s ice skim a stone falls such is winter— breath settling into sleep neither the ground or air or I give much attention to its immediacy I have forgotten how it threatens the seven junctions

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of my tent the oxford nylon rip-stop a reflective web I’m curled within what I know of outside is sound half tracks wind swept drifting the wind on its way & loneliness a woman in the world un-staked tackling the tarp’s insistent flapping no amount of wishing quells it even the swallows in a game of tag dismiss the cooling air I’ve watched them wake featherless smaller than my thumb and dropped the severed grubs to calm their muffled callings I moved their mother from the nest examining the wound around her neck the splintered socket territorial—

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too close to others and not the mess a raccoon makes another bird a collision in mid air she made it back her young were hatched I could not feel her in my awkward outstretched hand no weight no feather against my skin stillness and a scale that needs fine-tuning and more that I have missed I learned to pray no, I learned to want to pray to what— so I prayed to the green a hawthorn makes its red varnished thorns glancing and mean to roots coming out through rock to silence and I walked to the edge of the world where trees had grown and one now stands so slight of color the cliffs and birds and eggs and shit

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the sky already low and dropping a granite vein run through I gathered a leathery oak leaf and fit my fingers to its lobes palm against palm some reassurance of all before and all before and so on and so on in the same way here and at last I found a human habit birds going through my life II. The church of the oak a storm sky in winter is pearl I follow instead of men birds beyond which I can go no further than for nine years your fingers in the margins kept the pages slow turning

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until I a spear turned plucked out my heart and set it in the ground and walked from the place of its beating even now and today I am hollow a great tree has grown through me its roots draw at the moon’s wobbling the suggestion of a tide I have spied myself in the oak’s scoring and when the season’s last acorn falls in gathering the gallnuts I have brought to the great oak the failings of my life and set them down I understand how the heart resides in the singleness of a sorrow how fruit that never ripens turns to ink and in this instant man— I break from you the nameless trees the broad rivers the birds in mid-flight

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wounded the dark surviving eyes my two good wings my false starts great oak— I have been wrong for nine years I sent out prayers on the night wind to a godless world I lived aside an imagined life when the folded wings of a hen blackened in a flare up her quills unplucked fluted steam nothing belled the loss and I, a coward kept to the hedges cataloguing my silence in the wren and nettle in bleating I could not answer— to disentwine my life from yours is not purpose but when I turn to search for my wild heart I find an entire world pitched between our leaning frames III. Undoing the spell what clouds

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what sky keeps the outside of your circle’s reach you speak of woods confined to zones of cold water of fluted growths amid the rock and tangled weeds I have slowed before a clutch unguarded marsh grass within a marsh bush and found the egg was diamond white against the rain, I have seen a hill become a pock marked strand and a sound a human sound insisting I turn to seek it I turn to spring tumbling from the brush deep of the earth’s clay waking I want of the masculine I my lips unconfined my hips and ribs searching for sorrow to keep for a lover kept in the presence of his sex this is who I am this is who I am until the prairie grass parts a narrowing trail and I offer to you

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my ocean IV. Maying was I awake was I dreaming on that day even the sun strayed from her womb I walked to clear my head & overheard the bees whispering to the oak— one two and I knew I was not alone a body within a body a body within my body as simple as that your first fluttering, son I was afraid to move & then I saw a white-gray bird the flight gone out of her little bird I have spent my life mending such spaces help me understand our myths are filled with sacred rivers & ensnaring life so easily coming and going— I expected her to answer the way birds in stories

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do greedy I wanted her to be my compass but whatever she was was gone so I returned her to the ground for her ghost to find her and the spring storms and turned my attention back to you and didn’t know what to say this was the first of many times I’ve wondered of your animal shape and of our becoming son— you will not remember this but once half-hidden we found a copse from which we watched a pair of birds if excess can be offered take their wing snap the sheen of dark forms falling briefly claret headlong through a clearing and know here, too, you will find

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Esteban I.V. Galindo

Mrs. Foster Douglas I called Irene from Yuma: eleven o’clock at night, twenty degrees in the wind, from the pay phone outside of the Denny’s. I was surprised she answered and she was just as surprised when I asked to meet me for drinks the following afternoon. When the conversation was over, I hung up and ran back to the truck. I almost cried from the cold.

Our drinking on Sundays was an old habit. It had started years earlier when we had both been undergraduates at State University. We’d sit, in the dark, away from the windows, and spend the afternoon talking about anything we could think of. It kept us cool in the summer, warm in the winter, and together. We’d been friends, close friends, and, for one reason or another, we never had the courage to move beyond that. But when I think about those times now, all those Sundays ago, it was the nearest I had ever been to a perfect relationship.

I drove through the night to meet Irene. I left a dry and smoggy California winter and emerged into a bitterly cold and snowy New Mexican winter. I pulled the truck to the side of the interstate just past Lordsburg to watch the rising sun reflect off the dust of snow that covered the desert. Beside the wind blowing, it was silent. When I left New Mexico, nearly a year before, I had needed a week to pack and filled my truck, front and rear, completely. Once I had decided to leave California though, it had taken me just two days to pack . I left a lot for my neighbors to divide among themselves. In the end, I returned to New Mexico with less stuff than I had left with.

In Las Cruces, all roads eventually lead to El Patio. It’s a cavernous bar in Mesilla; that’s Cruces’s historic suburb. On the outside, it’s just another biker bar in need of a paint job. The real magic of the place, like any speakeasy, is on the inside. El Patio is all arches and Mexican brick. It’s huge, easily five thousand square feet, with three pool tables, a stage and dance-floor, wraparound booths all dominated by a two-sided bar. Lito, a square built part time weight lifter, is the weekend manager and, on Sundays, is behind the taps. During the week, it’s the kind of place you drink off a defeat. But, on weekends, it’s a place to celebrate a victory by matching shots with your best bud. You can always take your piece

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on the side to El Patio but never the wife because it’s not that kind of place.

We’d all be there on Saturday nights, of course, drinking off finals, term papers, work, or the student senate: Matt, Captain Morgan, myself, Irene, Shawna, Eric, Bill, Donna-Beth, and, of course, Frankie, who didn’t drink but who use to tow our asses home. There were others on those wild music filled beer soaked nights: Johnna, Becky Van, the Anvil, Cisco, the Werlings, Devon, Andie the Freshman, Teresa, and, among others, Colin who knew the secret of The Counting Crows “Mr. Jones” before any of us. It was the early 1990’s. The Great Eighties had just ended and we were confused, weird, and in college. The Gulf War and OJ Simpson trial were screwing with our collective sense of justice. And we were reading Conrad, Joyce, and Morrison for the first time. It was a small town tucked away in a huge desert full of little people with big ideas. To me, though, it became just enough. It became home.

By 10:30 A.M., I had half of my life back. Of the two storage places in town, one was open on Sundays. I rented a closet at the Main Street lot and unpacked the truck into it, fighting the wind the entire time. Next, I pulled out a clean shirt, changed in the truck, and headed over to the Hildagos’ house. Over another cup of coffee, they rented me a small place in the “student ghetto”. In Las Cruces, even in this day and age, deals to reconstruct one’s life can still be struck over coffee and pan dulce.

“You deserve better than that little place,” Carol told me.

“You have a Master’s degree.”

Leaning over my coffee, I replied, “Actually, once I get working, I don’t plan on staying.” Carol and Tony exchanged looks.

“Wait. That’s not right,” I said, waving a hand through the air. “Once I’m working, I’d like to rent that little property you have over on North Mesa. The one with the little adobe guest room out back. I could fix it up for you and maybe rent it to a friend or something. You know, if you still have it.” I kept forgetting how long I’d actually been away.

“Well, yeah, we still got it, but you shouldn’t be renting, boy,” Tony cut in. “Once you’re on your feet we should talk about you buying that little patch of scrub. You do have your Master’s, after all. You should own property.” As warm and inviting as they’d been, I think I winced when Tony spoke those last few words. Being a property owner wasn’t something I was ready for quite yet.

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I walked into El Patio at five minutes before two. The warmth of the place hit me like a slap to face. The clouds outside had turned dark and the air smelled of rain. It would storm hard, I figured, before my story was done. But, inside was warm, inviting, and, in that huge empty bar, intimate. Lito was manning the taps and he had to do a double take before he finally smiled: “What the fuck is this. When you did you roll back in?”

I took his offered hand. “This morning. I’m meeting the big I. How’s things?”

Without even bothering to ask, he poured me a coffee and Turkey. “Good enough. Old Man Malone passed on; two months now. The Great American got torn down. You hear about that yet?”

I shook my head. “Haven’t even gone to that side of town yet. That’s too bad about the Old Man. How long they been back?”

I nodded toward a table near the front door. Abbot and Mr. Lincoln had returned while I had been away. They sat, silently, half-empty pint glasses in front of each, staring intently at the chessboard between them. They’d been a feature of El Patio for years; Irene and I had watched them play for what seemed like forever. A single game between them would last for weeks. They’d sit, for hours, pondering strategies and tactics before ever daring to make a move. And, when one finally moved a piece, they’d break into a heated exchange of grunts and muttered insults. Then, one day, they simply weren’t there.

“About three weeks. Still on their first game. Rumor has it they were up north. Did you hear about the new Applebees?”

I didn’t even know an Applebees restaurant had been built in town.

“They shut it down. They got mice. What they get for building way out there on East Side.”

We talked some more. Lito got me caught up with the comings and the goings. After he poured me another, and just as I was getting warmed up, I moved to our booth. The booths at El Patio are throwbacks. They’re real leather, that curve at an almost impossible angle, with high padded backs. On a good day you can sink into them, and, on a dark enough night, become invisible. Our usual booth had the best panoramic view of El Patio. We could see anything or anyone come and go from the bar.

Irene arrived at twenty minutes after two. She swooped in the front door: wet and bearing gifts. She stood on the bar’s brass rail and kissed Lito’s shaved head. She swung her hips in salutation

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to Abbot and Mr. Lincoln. She rounded the corner and, finally seeing me, threw her arms wide, proclaiming, “He’s returned! Kill the fatted calf! The son who was lost is found.” She spun, almost losing her balance. “Thank you Jesus!”

I stood, already buzzed from caffeine and alcohol, and hugged her. She started to pull out, but I pulled her in close and held her. Finally, slowly, I let her sit.

“Well, here,” she began, plopping a paper bag on the table between us, “I thought you’d appreciate this.”

I don’t think she knew how right she was. I tore into the white bag to find a New Mexican treasure: two green-chile burritos from Roberto’s Famous Chiles. I meant to savor the flavor I’d missed so much, but I wolfed them down, ordered a pitcher from Lito, and waited for Irene to arrange herself. She waited until I had poured her a beer before starting in on me.

“So. What the fuck? You call me in the middle of the night for drinks on Sunday. Hello? You live twelve hours away.”

“I lived that far away. Life on the coast didn’t agree with me.”

“Honey, I’ve been to your mother’s house. It can disagree with me anytime.”

My mother had her house built in 1995 after divorcing my stepfather. She bought an empty lot on El Camino Real, just down the street from the Mission Catholic Church, and spent the next year arguing with her architect, then her contractor, then the city council, but, in the end, as always, she eventually wore everyone down and bent them to her will.

My mother’s house is not huge, but it is spacious. It’s built in a classic Spanish mission style with the living spaces built around open air patios. My mother’s house has two such patios. The front one, that guests see, features a half scale replica of the fish fountain built inside the historic Mission San Juan Capistrano. The other patio, the one that guests are not permitted to visit, is my mother’s personal space. She maintains a meticulous flower garden.

My mother still works five days week. She’s most hands-on with her catering business. But she either also co-owns or owns outright a car wash, a check-cashing business, the only real tortillaria left in south OC, and the only liquor store in town that features Mexican brands of everything that a newly arrived illegal immigrant might want or need to remind themselves of home.

“So start the fucking story already,” Irene almost whined.

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I took a deep breathe and plunged in. “I’m going to be a father.”

That stopped her. Instead of saying anything else, she lit her first smoke and took a long pull. Finally, she said: “With whom?”

“Her name is Lauren. Lauren Davis-Douglas. She’s thirtysix, has a degree from Scripps College in Art History, devotes a lot of time to charitable causes, and is Mrs. Foster Douglas.”

“A married woman?” she asked. “You made a baby with a married woman?”

“Yeah. I mean, I think I did.” I ran a hand through my hair to steady myself. “I mean, I’m pretty sure I did.”

Irene looked like she didn’t know to laugh or to cry so I took a deep breath, a deeper drink, and started my story: “You know how it started. I graduated and was just waiting for something to come my way. My mother called to say that she had an excellent job opportunity for me back home. I went out there, interviewed, and, in short order, had been awarded a position as deputy director of activities for the Capistrano Valley Boys and Girls’ Club.”

“And whatever the fuck made them think you were qualified for that job? You have a master’s degree in archaeology.”

“Do you know any other male who worked six of his seven years of college at the Early Childhood Development Center? Or how about working with the Upward Bound Teen program every summer?”

“Well, I stand corrected. Pour me another and get to the baby making part.”

“Patience, my dear, is a virtue. I quickly marked my territory and started working the system. Fortunately, it didn’t take long to stand out. I quickly proved myself to the club’s directors. I was then allowed to meet the schoolmarms and such that constantly frequented the Club. All this was just a few months at most. By the summer, I was openly managing most of the teen activities. By this time it was nearing the end of August. That’s the beginning of fund raising time. It wasn’t too much longer until I was being introduced to the major donors.”

“Why? Who would give a fuck who you are?”

“I’m a young bilingual Hispanic male returning to the barrio I was raised in to give back to the community that gave me so much. You figure it out.”

“Did you ever once go the Club when you were a kid?”

“Not a single fucking time,” I told her, “My mother was too cheap to pay the monthly fee. It was cheaper for her to take me to

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work. But that was the company spin and I was expected to make it work. In any case, during the course of a midsummer night’s fundraiser, I made the acquaint of Mrs. Foster Douglas. As it turned out, her husband’s children, when younger, had enjoyed the use of the Club.”

“Wait. You lost me. I thought you said this broad was thirty-something?”

“I did. She is. Bear with me, majesty, and I will be brief.”

I told Irene that I had, as a child, known the original Mrs. Foster Douglas. I can’t picture her face anymore; whenever I try to, I conjure an image of Barbara Bush. She, and, by extension, her husband, had been among the first and most loyal of my mother’s customers. She bore Mr. Foster Douglas four children, three boys and a girl. The daughter and I are roughly the same age; I know this only because it was drilled into my head growing up. However, my senior year in high school, 1989, Mrs. Douglas became ill and died quite suddenly. The town mourned for a year.

“The entire fucking town?”

I poured us each another. Outside, the rain had started and the parking lot lamps had turned on. “To understand this, you must understand the town of San Juan Capistrano. It’s not too unlike Las Cruces: it predates most of the state around it; it’s traditionally a ranch town; it’s predominately Hispanic and Catholic; and, it’s home to a few select land owning, founding families that take great pride in their role in local history. Among the five Founding Families of San Juan Capistrano, is the Douglas family.”

I went on to tell her, in brief, about the Douglas's’ Triple-J ranch and their role in taming the wild Capistrano Valley during the 1880’s. I made mention of their assistance in founding both the Mission Catholic Church, in 1915, and, later, Fr. Serra Catholic High School. I touched upon the infamous of Arthur “Chuey” Douglas and his failed bid to rob the First United Capistrano Valley Bank in 1966. Finally I told her how, in 1986, the Douglas family has used old entertainment connections to bring about the televising of the annual Swallows Day parade.

“No shit,” she cut in, “I always thought it was a little hokey.”

“Whatever. That’s major action for that small town. In any case, the original Mrs. Douglas had dutifully stood by her man through the whole process. Until, of course, her untimely death.

The newest Mrs. Foster Douglas and I had met at the annual ‘Fiesta

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Daze Fundraiser’. Which was, of course, catered by my mother’s company.”

Since we were two of the youngest people at the event, besides the token children, we bonded quickly. That night, over glasses of mid-priced chardonney, we shared a rather lively conversation. As it turns out, her degree in Art History had included a decent sized portion of anthropological theory.

Irene rolled her eyes. “Yes. That’s fascinating. Get to the sexy time already.”

Ignoring Irene, I continued to say that that night Lauren and I had swapped e-mails with the intent of continuing our conversation. We traded e-mails the next day. Within a week, our e-mails became personal, then, in anther week, intimate. We swapped phone numbers and talked over the phone. A week after that, we were texting each other every hour on the hour.

“Just a minute,” Irene started, hanging a cigarette in midair.

“Where’s her beloved husband during all this?”

That was special point I wanted to make. For a man in his mid-sixties, Foster Douglas was amazingly active. He went into the offices of his real estate development business, his primary source of income, four days a week; then volunteer work; the yacht club; Rotary; tea twice a week with the monsignor; etc., etc., etc.…Mr. Foster Douglas was often out of the house. He had plenty of things to do. Lauren, on the other hand, had precious little to do in order to fill the hours of the day.

“Think of whom she married,” I told Irene. “Think of who she had to become. It was perfectly acceptable to catch site of Mrs. Foster Douglas strolling the mall; a Saks Fifth bag draped over one arm. But, Mrs. Foster Douglas can’t be seen at the gym getting sweaty as if she’s just another housewife in a rush. Mrs. Foster Douglas can be seen sipping wine at an opening or a fund-raiser, but she can never, ever, drop into Hennesey’s Pub and have a beer with the girls.”

Lauren had been a single woman for a long time I told Irene. She’d been a single woman with a career and passions and friends her own age. All that changed in the months following her wedding. Being Mrs. Foster Douglas was a full time profession. And it was all consuming. By her own admission, Lauren became distant to once close friends and associates. She had cried while telling me that she had become a “wedding friend” to once near and dear sorority sisters. By the time I met her, Lauren had no real friends of

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her own. Her friends were “their” friends. And all of them were twenty to thirty years older than she was.

Irene was quiet for a minute. “Why the fuck did she ever marry into that?”

“I eventually asked her the same damn thing. And you know what she said? That it had been easy to fall for Foster Douglas. From the day they met, she’d been in love.” Lauren had told me once that the first time she and Foster Douglas had made love he’d been as shy as a schoolboy. I told her that nowadays, schoolboys weren’t all that shy. I should know; I worked with them day in and day out. But, she had shook her head and said that Foster Douglas had fumbled and blushed through their first intimate encounter. She told me that that had opened her heart more than anything else.

Irene gagged, then poured herself the last of the pitcher, and said, “That’s one pathetic sister. Hey! Lito! Beer me! Beer me real good baby!”

Of course, there at the bar with Irene, I was the Monday Morning Quarterback. At the time, I thought I was meeting someone like myself: educated, socially conscious, and stuck in circumstances beyond our control. I thought she was bound to her husband in the same sort of way that I was the only person left to go to my mother’s rescue. She had gone to Foster the same way I had returned home after a long absence: wary but optimistic. I supposed, at the time, that she had married Foster because for all his blustery yet very real power in Capistrano, there was something soft and warm underneath. When my mother told me that my sisters had all left and that she was surrounded by snakes and liars and was alone and afraid and needed someone she could trust to be near, I wanted to believe to it.

But, of course, there at the bar, I knew that those suppositions had been wrong. Lauren had woken up one day and entered that most fantastic of prisons with both eyes open and her back straight. I drove a car for twelve hours through the desert I had begun to call home to the coast I had just begun to forget. I didn’t like Irene’s tone, but she was right about Lauren and, even though she didn’t say it, me.

“All right, it went like this. We took our first ‘date’ the last Saturday in September. We drove up to Tustin for the opening of some exhibit at the cultural museum. She dressed up like something out of L.A. Confidential: dark glasses, scarf wrapped up around her

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hair, uncharacteristically demure. She even had her stockings straight.”

“And you? Did you put up your coy little boy lost act?”

I told her that I had at first. One just doesn’t pull up to the Douglas homestead. One has to be invited onto the grounds. So Lauren cooked up some story that I was going to tutor her in ‘ancient wall art of the American Southwest’. I had told her that it sounded too academic and that Foster would never fall for it. But, her word proved true when she, without hesitation, hopped into my aging Ford pickup while it was still rolling to a stop. We arrived at the exhibit right on time and talked our way through the first hall.

But by the time we got into the museum’s second display we were holding hands. When we got to the diorama we had our arms around each others’ waists. And before I dropped her off back her palace, we had made love at a dingy east-side motel.

Irene wrinkled her brow and looked at me seriously. “You made a baby on the first try?”

“No, of course not. No one ever does. Besides, we took the truck and I always have a stash of condoms in the glove compartment.”

Irene guffawed into her beer. “And how old were those things?”

“About a year. But, God bless Trojans, because they were still soft and supple when they hit fresh air.” Things escalated quickly. Lauren and I would meet every chance we could. Even though she was childless, she found excuses to get to the Club during the quiet middle of the day so we could have rough sex in one of the closets. I stole the key to my mother’s homeowners’ association pool, where we would soak and touch while Foster dozed in front of Monday Night Football. She invented girlfriends to visit and night classes to take. We hit upon a quiet dark back alley bar in Laguna Beach were we would shed our public personas and just sit; sipping vodka tonics and fighting the impulse to talk about the future both of us knew we could never have.

“You actually drank vodka tonics?”

“It’s California. It’s different out there. But, the point was that we were doing anything and everything to get around her husband.”

“And your mother. I can only imagine, if what you’ve said is true, what effect such events would have on your poor failing mother.”

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“Ah, yes,” I said, finishing off the beer in my glass. “ My mother. The Queen.” While all this was happening, I told Irene, my mother had settled into what I thought was a pleasant busy season. I helped her out when I could, had dinner at her house on Sundays, and was genuinely impressed by her generosity and graciousness. Two traits that my mother was not normally known for.

A few weeks later, Foster had, I was told, finalized his annual trip to Arizona. He and some old buddies took off every year to a golf spa outside of Tempe. It was tradition and, for those invited, not to be missed. Accordingly, Lauren and I made plans to get away. I booked us into a Temecula bed and breakfast that overlooked a vineyard.

Irene nodded, clearly on the verge of intoxication, saying, “A masterful plan but I sense a…‘but’ coming.”

“Of course. I waited there, alone, for four hours.”

“Was the wine any good?”

“The merlot was okay but the cabernet was to die for.”

Irene: “And I’ll bet her excuse was lame and see-though.”

Me: “Not as much as you might think. Ready for it? It turned out that Foster had, at the very last minute, insisted that Lauren make the trip with him. So she dutifully packed a weekend bag and went.”

Irene: “Because what the fuck else did she have to do? It’s not like she had an extramarital affair to carry on.”

I didn’t call her for two weeks. Even after that, it was another week or ten days before we saw each other again. Suffice it to say that I was angry. I had laid out good money for a trip that never happened. I mean, I wasn’t terribly proud of myself. I was, after all, having an affair with the wife of the most prominent man in town. But, I was, I thought, understandably upset.

A hot October followed the dull summer and autumn, such as it was in Southern California, was in full swing. Lauren and I made up over a very rare dinner out. Foster was out of town and my mother busy with catering a weeknight wedding so we headed up to Newport Beach for a actual date. Lauren seemed more reserved that night. She didn’t add much to the conversation and couldn’t wait to get back to my apartment. Once there, she put on a show for the ages. At the time I thought that her enthusiasm was due to the magic of “make-up sex”.

Over the next few weeks, however, our love making become even more brazen. Lauren insisted that we do it at my

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apartment during the day. She had always like sex a little rough, but now she was almost violent. She began howl and scratch like a professional. I could only imagine what the neighbors suspected when they saw the new white $100,000 Cadillac parked in the weedchoked lot. “A property, I might add, owned by my mother by the virtue of a loan secured on the good word of Mr. Foster Douglas.”

“I sense,” Irene cut in, wagging a finger at me, “a major turn coming.”

We made love three times like that. But, my performance was far from perfect. Lauren: a seasoned sex professional putting on the show of a lifetime. Me: a nervous wreck. After each, she lounged around my threadbare apartment, nude, making a spectacle of herself. She would sit on the balcony with an open bottle of beer held loosely between her legs. Or, she would watch the afternoon talk shows like a man: disgusted yet unable to turn the channel while scratching herself and drinking vodka the entire time.

Of course, I had to head back to work each time, so I would hop into the shower to wash the worse of our sins off of me, dress, and try to convince myself that this was, in fact, what I wanted. After the second of these sessions, my eyes wondered to the trash can just outside the shower stall and I couldn’t find the condom I had just used. It’s not a big thing, I thought, I probably just buried it under some paper. But, after our third session, I actually rooted through the can to find it, but it was nowhere to be found.

“You actually rifled through a wastebasket to find a used condom?”

“I had to. I was getting paranoid by then. Things were coming apart. She was coming part. I was freaking the fuck out. So that’s when I decided to end it. I called it off the next day.”

Irene nodded knowingly. “Now I get it. She had poked holes in the rubbers, stole them back to hide the evidence, then waited quietly just long enough to confirm that she was pregnant.

Once she has such confirmation, she goes, smiles and all, to her husband, sells him on the story that the Viagra has worked and, bingo, she’s going to bear him yet another heir; when she knows, full well that they baby isn’t his. That way, when a beautiful brown little baby pops out of her full white belly, she gets back at the man she blames for ruining her promising young life while once again driving you, her coconspirator and victim, in shame, from the town of your mother’s success. Bastardizing you, once again, in the eyes of your mother.” She slapped her hand to the table, almost tipping the pitcher of beer. “Damn I’m good.”

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“You’re close,” I said. “Order us a closer and I’ll tell you how it all ends.” With that I stood and walked, ever so slightly tilted, to the toilet.

The bathroom’s single small window was open maybe six inches. It was dark outside and the rain was heavy, beating against window and its pane. But the scent of the night was thick and full; fragrant as any bouquet. It smelled of desert rain: sage, onion, and freshly turned over dirt. I’m not sure how long I stood in the corner of the restroom, deeply inhaling the smell of the rain. It could have been a minute or an hour.

Seated once again, one of Lito’s espressos parked squarely in front of me, I started by saying, “The next morning was the day I was going to end things with Lauren. I wasn’t sure what my next step was, but I knew that I would have to do something fast. ” That day was a Saturday, and it was finally cold. A rare November storm had rolled into the OC: raining and getting as cold as it ever gets in Southern California. I got up early, showered and cooked breakfast. I was into my second cup of coffee when there was a knock at my door.

“How Hitchcockian!” Irene shrilled. “I mean…really!

Think of it: the rain, the tension, memories of passion. You couldn’t have planned it any better.”

For the first time that night, Irene had been wrong. At the door had been two deputies from the Orange County Sheriff Dept.

They were there to serve a child support warrant, but they had the wrong apartment.

“Needless to say, I was scared shitless. I mean, how did I know that Foster Douglas, a longtime and very public supporter of the department, hadn’t called in a favor to have me harassed. But, they weren’t. I walked them to the stairway, pointed them in the right direction and turned to beat a retreat.”

That was when I spotted that familiar white Escalade in the parking lot. I made a break for my open door, but she was already standing at the bottom of the stairs. Her hair was ratty and unwashed, her make-up running, and with dark sunglasses askew.

“Wait. Stop,” she called up at me. “Just hear me out!”

Me: “Lauren, for Christ’s sake, lower your voice.”

Her: “Just wait. Wait. Just let me up to talk…”

Me: “It’s over Lauren. Do you hear me? It’s over…”

Her: “I know. I know. But, just wait, please wait, I just want to…”

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Me: “Lauren, I can’t do this. Not now and not like this…”

Her: “I’m pregnant.”

I stood speechless for a minute before I ushered her inside. I put her in the shower, fixed another pot of coffee, put some bread to toast, and waited. She emerged, wrapped up in my oldest most comfortable robe, looking slightly better. Her hair was piled high, her face clear, but her eyes red and puffy. She smiled weakly as I set her a cup of fresh coffee and three warm buttery slices.

Lauren: “I just want to say that I’m sorry. I’m sorry I got you involved in all this. You’re a nice guy. You’re a great guy; a really great person. You’re warm and generous and silly and you remind of the person who I used to be.”

I started with the only question I could think of, “Is the baby mine?”

She continued as if in a trance, “I’m sorry about the weekend in Temecula. I so wanted to go the country with you. I wanted to pretend to be your wife. But, when Foster insisted that I go with him, I couldn’t say ‘no’. I wanted to call you. And I tried. I did. I swear. But as soon as we got settled into the suite, Foster confiscated my cell phone and organizer. He said we were there to relax and to be with friends.”

I tried again. “Lauren, please, who is the father?”

She drank a little coffee and made a face. “It’s strong,” she said sheepishly before her eyes again fogged over and she went somewhere else to tell her story. “We met our ‘friends’ that night for dinner. I didn’t know any of the men; they were out of state business associates of Foster’s. But, every couple was like us. I mean, it was a bunch of old men with younger women. There was one girl there who looked like she’d just gotten out of high school. She would laugh when she was nervous. It was weird. I was the oldest woman at the dinner table. I couldn’t stop asking myself why these men had brought their wives or girlfriends or whatever they were when they were supposed to play golf and drink all weekend.”

It was right then that a spotlight went off in my head so I asked a different question. “Lauren,” I said gently, “Who is Foster Douglas?”

She made a noise that was halfway between laughing, crying and growling. “Mr. Foster Douglas is a fake. He’s a con artist.

He has tea with a Catholic priest then surfs the internet looking for little girl porn. He donates thousands to Rotary for its charities, then builds second rate rat-trap apartment buildings here. He makes home and business loans to people he knows won’t be able to make

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their payments, then he cooks his books to sell those loans to other lenders at a profit.”

She stopped to drink coffee. I wisely kept my mouth shut.

“Foster Douglas is the worst monster I know. He’s cruel and spoiled and a liar. He’s a sadist who gets off on embarrassing women. You should see this web site he pays for. It’s all just girls who look like they’re twelve having sex with older men who call them names and insult them. He used to watch that then come to bed and want to…you know.”

I nodded then she added, “You know what? He stopped making love to me after he married me. After we were married, it was just about the sex. I wanted the love.”

“Lauren,” I asked gently, “What happened out in Arizona?”

She grimaced with real pain. “They did worse to those little girls than to me. They’d slip them drugs in the drinks to make them easier to use. They dressed them up like dolls. They swapped them around like they swapped golf clubs on the course. ‘Give it a go,’ one would say to the other. They were dirty old men playing out their sick fantasies. They were cruelest to the youngest one. She was just a little girl really. They drugged her up, stripped her down, and poke and prodded her with anything they could get their hands on.

Two of them tried to take her at the same time, but the poor thing was so drugged, she couldn’t react. ‘Stupid bitch’, they called her.

‘Can’t hold her liquor,’ they said. Then they dumped her in a corner and forgot about her.”

She drank a little more coffee. “That first night, Foster had me just sitting on the couch next to him. I just sat there, hazy from whatever they put in my drink, and watched. By the next night, Foster couldn’t keep the rest of them from looking at me. ‘Hey, Foster, no holding back. We all share here,’ they told him. I think I remember one of them touching me, then undressing me and then he...” But she didn’t cry. She held back every tear.

“You know what the highlight of the weekend was?” Lauren asked me. “I woke up the next morning sore and feeling hung-over.

I couldn’t believe the bits and pieces that I did remember. I was sick to my stomach and puked for what seemed like hours. The men were in the lounge watching football. Just as the girls were rousing themselves, the men started pouring more drinks into them. By sundown, the girls were almost lethargic. I held out for as long as I could, but when Foster noticed I wasn’t drinking, he pulled me aside. ‘Don’t ruin this for me,’ he said. ‘These guys control a lot of money. Money I need. Money I use to make sure you get everything

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you want. Including that second rate beaner boyfriend of yours. Be smart. Have a future. Make sure your amigo has a future. Get with the program. You’re Mrs. Foster Douglas and this is the hand we’ve been dealt.’ ” “Sweet Jesus Christ,” Irene swore. She was angry now.

“What a fucking prick.”

Lauren told me that she didn’t honestly know who the father of her baby was. Given Foster’s age, she hadn’t been careful about birth control. It could have been Foster, any one of the other men from that weekend, or, most likely, me.

“What are we going to do?” I asked Lauren.

She sipped a little more coffee and I saw her back straighten. “There is no ‘we’. You are going to quit the club and go back to New Mexico. You will not attempt to contact me again.

You will live your life and forget about me.”

“But if that’s my child…” I began.

“This is not your child,” she told me fatly, her shoulders squared and her jaw set. “This child is a Douglas. It will be the next child of Mr. and Mrs. Foster Douglas. And this child will have all the benefits and privileges of being such. The only father this child will ever know will be Foster Douglas. If you ever try to push your way into this child’s life, I will let Foster crush you. And your mother.” Despite the robe and towel wrapped around her head, Lauren truly was, at that moment, Mrs. Foster Douglas.

“What has my mother…”

“Who do you think got you that job to begin with? There were ten other candidates with more real world experience than you. You have degrees in archaeology for God’s sake. Think about it. Who uses the Club more than anyone else? Immigrant families with lots of kids. Want do they need? Jobs. And who funds the Club? Rich white donors who need cheap household labor. Your mother wanted you in the club to sell her businesses to both groups of people. Foster teamed up with her to sell his ‘affordable housing’.

Then, in the end, when all the right palms have been greased, everyone comes out a winner. You’re a tool. You’ve been used.

Welcome to the club.”

Irene’s eyes softened and her voice was low as she said, “And that’s what makes you sickest isn’t it?”

I nodded and sipped the steaming coffee in front of me. It was hot, dark, and strong. Which could describe both Irene and my mother. Irene was New Mexican born and raised; with more than a little Indian in her past. Her face was broad, but heart-shaped. She

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wore little make-up and had her hair cut into a long banged bob.

She wasn’t a thin girl but not exactly heavy. She looked strong; like she could bed steel rods or deflect bullets with nothing but her bare hands. Irene was tanned dark year-round and had the tendency to run hot and cold and, make no mistake, she was loud and bordered on annoying. But the biggest difference between her and my mother was that Irene would never lie to you.

Irene’s ambitions weren’t for real estate or for certificates of deposit. She wasn’t led to undercut, or deceive, or manipulate situations for her own benefit. My mother’s mindset was more mercenary. She approached her life as she did her businesses; always in terms of her bottom-line. She dealt with profit and loss.

She hoarded any profits and cut any losses. She’d done that with her husbands first and then her children.

The last I saw of Mrs. Foster Douglas was as she left my apartment. She changed into a blouse and slacks she had had there, gone carefully down the stairs, started her Cadillac remotely, and left my life. I started giving stuff away that day. On the following Monday, I told the executive director that I wouldn’t be coming back after Wednesday. For whatever reason, he didn’t seem surprised. I never called my mother to tell her I was leaving. If she hadn’t already been appraised of the situation one way or another, I figured, it wouldn’t be long before she was. A rare wet autumn gave way to a more common dry and smoggy winter.

Irene and I sat for what seemed like a long time. Then, suddenly, she said, “So, you’re not really going to be a father. I mean, Foster Douglas will, sure. But not you.”

“That’s not how I feel,” was all I said to her.

The rain continued to beat upon the window behind us.

We could hear Lito washing glasses and straightening bottles. We had even outlasted Lincoln and Abbot. We discovered that they had packed their chessboard, after they each took separate Polariods to verify their places on the board, and left quietly. Irene finally broke the long silence by asking, “Where are you staying tonight?”

I shrugged then smiled. “You know what? I don’t know. I can’t move into the new place until Tuesday. And I gotta get a haircut and start looking for a job.” I took off my glasses and ran a hand through my hair. “So I guess I’m on vacation until then.”

Irene slowly smiled her lopsided grin and looked at me from under her long bangs.

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Mary Marie Dixon

Shorty’s Lament When they stopped usin’ the horses— That was the end of the manure spreader.

Took three outfits to spread all the manure. Some’d load, Some’d take the field, a couple hundred pounds on each section.

We had at least four horses at a time. Didn’t neglect them either.

No how. Sal, she used to nudge me for sugar, I always brought sugar cubes.

Workers, they was, eighteen hands high And broad as a barn door.

Team plowing, when you hit the rocks…

Flip you right over the plow.

Them horses better be alert or they’d drag you right on Through the field…

The trees worked against you from the roots.

The late forties, that was When we got the tractors.

Still, there was the threshing, Neighbors pitched in to rent An old McCormick Deering Took lots a men to run it.

Boy the table boards would groan then. Dumplings, bread, homeMade noodles, kolache, kraut, pickled chow-chows.

By nightfall, the dust on your neck ‘bout drove you crazy.

Hanging popcorn to dry.

We ate pie, meringues piled high, Coffee and politic talk.

We admired the fine neck of that cow horse Johnny bought.

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Pilgrimage We pitch rocks over the bridge into jellied water to scatter minnows in refuge mosses.

We slide down the bank into crystal clear pools and disturb a ground-blend tortoise.

Scuffling through dead weeds and shifted sand, we glimpse lifted dragonflies in milky waves on sylvan wings.

Our feet grate on ragged bottoms that cradle liquid silk and glittery jewelry fish.

Up top, on concrete rectangles, we reckoned it.

Down the sloping bank, we careened into it.

Over unleveled land into pits and burrs, we experienced it.

Splashing shallows with tricky bottoms, we greeded it.

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William McGee, Jr.

Through the Valley The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels.

—Matthew 13:39 After leaving his home in Washington, Henry crossed Idaho and the southwest corner of Montana and traveled south through Yellowstone National Park, eventually entering Jackson Valley in northwest Wyoming. Route 189 crawled across the bottom of the expansive valley, between the majestic Grand Tetons to Henry’s west—the glorious sunset behind their peaks—and the elk refuge to his east.

The night before he’d entered Jackson Hole, Henry had camped in a wooded area just off the main road, and as he slept in a sleeping bag under the stars, he’d dreamt of her again. She’d spoken directly to him again, beckoning him east, holding out her arms as if to embrace him. But this time, instead of the shorts or tank tops or other assorted exercise clothing she had worn on Denise Austin’s Fit and Lite, she wore a long, heavy high-waisted skirt and a stiff blouse. Plus, her hair had been pulled back into a bun.

“Henry,” she’d breathed, clutching a leather-bound book to her chest, “where are you?”

In his dream, he was walking along the shoulder of some unidentified road, when she materialized in front of him. “I’m on my way, uh, darling,” he replied, but then he realized two terrible things: one, the Endeavor was gone, he’d never see it again and would have to walk for years to get to her now; and, two, he had just called her, of all things, uh, darling. Like that wasn’t creepy. He put his head down, walked faster, and tried to convince himself that she hadn’t noticed.

“Do not think that the Lord is a god of the hills and not a god of the valleys,” she told him. “There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort, but I do await your arrival.”

“You look different today,” he said. “That a new outfit?”

Denise frowned. “Yes, I was going to mention that, Mr. Dreyfuss—I’m afraid I’m not myself today.” As she looked at her Victorian fashions, Henry realized she was speaking with a slight English accent. “I think your subconscious must be mixing me up with someone else.”

Of course. He’d read Pride and Prejudice in college—well, most of it, anyways; he had seen the movie—but he could see now

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that this vision was not quite Denise Austin; she was also a certainly erroneous likeness of Jane Austen.

“How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!” Denise/Jane said, suddenly appearing at his side. Her arm flew out, and he felt her fingernail stab into his cheek.

“Oww!” Henry yelled, sitting up in his sleeping bag and protecting his face with his hand. On his pillow, a large black beetle, its pincers opening and shutting, moved forward, Henry’s face no longer in its place.

As Henry drove the SUV into the city of Jackson, the bright neon green bandage on his cheek, he saw several people entering and exiting the motels and restaurants, none seeming to take much notice of him. He entered what looked like downtown Jackson, what with its public park surrounded by a flurry of shops, more restaurants and other attractions, people on horseback, in cars, but mostly on foot, in what looked like it had been—before the Rapture, of course—a tourist Mecca. Some store windows still advertised everything from T-shirts and toy bow and arrows to Charlie Russell prints and gold and turquoise jewelry, while others displayed crude signs offering “GUNS N AMMO” and “FRESH FOOD HERE.” In the center of what must have been a once great commercial establishment of modern shops and stalls gilded with rough wooden, Wild West storefronts, stood a square park cornered by large white arches. Henry drove around a parked stagecoach unloading passengers at the park and pulled into an empty parking spot in front of what looked like it might have been at one point a United Colors of Benneton. As he got out and locked the doors, a young man in buckskin shirt and pants, sitting in a folding chair at the edge of the park across the street, ran up to Henry and spoke.

“Hey—uh, I mean, howdy!” he said. “Howdy, pardner!

This your car?”

Henry looked at the thin, young man. In addition to the buckskins, he wore moccasins and had shaggy dark brown hair.

Under his arm, he carried a shoebox and clipboard.

“Oh, of course it’s your car! You were driving it, right?

Sorry.” He extended his hand. “The name’s Sam. What brings you here, uh, ‘round these parts?”

“Nice to meet you, Sam,” Henry said. “I’m Henry Dreyfuss. I’m just passing through on my way out east, and I wanted to stop to eat, stretch my legs, maybe spend the night.”

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“Well, all right. Mr. Dreyfuss, let me welcome you to our fair city. If you need food and rest, the Wort Hotel is a good place for both,” Sam said, pointing at something down the street, “but it’s pretty expensive. There’s also the Ranch Inn, or you can sometimes get a room at the Pink Garter or the old St. John’s Episcopal Church. As far as eating—well, if you like Mexican food, there’s the Merry Piglets. People also like the Cadillac Grille, the Cowboy Steakhouse, and the Acadian.” Sam turned and watched a large bus approach the square. It stopped for some pedestrians, then turned at the intersection.

“However,” Sam continued, “I have to tell you something else.” He leaned and spit chew into the gutter. “You can park here as long as you want, but there’s gonna be a price.”

“A price?” Henry asked. “Exactly how much are we talking?”

“Well, that’s negotiable, Mr. Dreyfuss. You’ll have to speak to the Abbot about that. He’ll decide.” Sam opened the shoebox and fingered through a collection of worn index cards. “You’ll appreciate the Abbot, Mr. Dreyfuss. He ain’t from around here—and he knows things.” Sam winked and smiled conspiratorially. “But, look, if you are going to park here, I’ll need your keys, and you’ll need to take this—to claim your vehicle later.”

Sam handed Henry an index card with a “7” written on it in red ink. “Just present this to me or Irma, if she’s in the office,” Sam said, pointing to the wooden hut across the street, “and we’ll be happy to return your keys—provided you’ve settled your account with the Abbot.”

Henry studied the index card. Unlike the dog-eared and water-stained cards in Sam’s shoebox, his looked new. “Is this the most secure system you could come up with? I mean, how do I know somebody else won’t make a card like this and claim my car?”

“Well, you have to sign for it, too,” Sam said. “Whenever you drop it off or pick it up, you have to sign for it. Right here,” he explained, pointing at the papers on his clipboard. “Besides, the Abbot said he’d take care of everything.”

“I probably don’t have many choices here, but I really can’t afford to lose what I’ve got.”

Sam nodded. “I understand, Mr. Dreyfuss. But perhaps you should read the back of the card.”

“The back of the card?” Henry flipped the card over, and saw a short message, also written in red ink.

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Dr. Dreyfuss, The Mitsubishi Endeavor will not be mishandled. Please give Sam your keys and get something to eat.

—A Henry silently placed the index card in the breast pocket of his flannel shirt. Sam handed him the clipboard and pen. “Just sign here, after the number seven.” Henry signed his name as the bus circled the park again and finally came to a stop, taking up several parking spaces. “Aw, jeez, that bus’s gonna bogart the parking spaces!” Sam said as Henry handed him the clipboard, the pen, and his keys. “Got to go, Mr. Dreyfuss. Have a nice time in Jackson and don’t forget to see the Abbot—he’s probably in Dirty Jack’s, where it’s always Saturnalia!” He turned and jogged towards the bus, which was now unloading passengers.

Henry took a last look at his Endeavor and stepped up onto the wooden sidewalk in front of the row of old shops and other businesses, all adorned with the wooden façade. It’s like a giant wild-west strip mall, he thought, walking on the creaking boards and noticing the hitching posts embedded into the curb. Or it was, at least. The hitching posts, probably intended as merely another affectation, now proved to be functional, as Henry noticed horses tied to almost every one.

“Tonight only! Free admission with coupon!” Ahead, Henry saw an elderly man in chaps and fringed vest passing out flyers and hawking some sort of entertainment. He handed a flyer to a man in a serape and turned to Henry. “Here you go, buddy—take one,” he said, handing him the yellow paper.

Henry looked at the hand-written flyer. SEE LOVELY LADIES! FOXY BOXING! PLUS FOOD & DRINKS FOR REASONABLE PRICES. “Where’s this place?” Henry asked the elderly man.

“Only the prettiest ladies and the best grub in town, buddy!” the old man said loudly. “Present your coupon for free admission!”

“Right, but where is this place?”

“Sorry, buddy, only one per customer!” The elderly man stepped away and accosted a group of three men in matching camouflage jackets.

Henry studied the flyer again and saw the name of the establishment in slightly smaller letters at the very bottom of the yellow paper. Well, he thought, I guess this decides my evening’s destination.

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Corner of Center & Cache ONLY AT DIRTY JACK’S! Apparently the lobby of Dirty Jack’s had once been a Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum, Henry observed as he waited in line to enter the theater and noticed the stuffed two-headed deer; the wax figures of Jack the Ripper and Vlad Tepes; the polished glass display case of what a gold plaque alleged was the incorruptible body of Jedediah Ewing, an outlaw killed in a botched bank robbery in 1872; and, other assorted oddities decorating the perimeter of the room.

“Please secure any and all firearms and/or weapons in our lockers, sir,” one of two large men in dark uniforms ordered Henry as he approached the ticket counter. He studied Henry’s large jacket. “If our metal detector goes off, you will be arrested.”

“All right, but look—I just wanted to get something to eat— and talk to—” “Your belongings will be secure in a locker, sir.” The large man towered over Henry and placed a heavy, meaty paw on his shoulder. “It’s just like at the airport or the mall. You put your stuff inside, you take the key, it locks, you keep the key till you need to open it again.”

Henry found an empty locker and put his pistol and knife inside. He still had his first aid kit under his jacket—was there anything metal in there? He knew it didn’t have a hypodermic needle, but what about scissors? He flipped open the white case, dropped the scissors in the locker, and put the kit back inside his jacket.

“Very good,” said the large man. “Thank you, sir.”

“So, what can I get to eat here?” Henry asked.

“We just handle the admission, sir,” said the smaller of the two men, but he must have been about 6’ 6”, Henry estimated.

“And I see you have a flyer.”

“Oh, yeah. Um—here.” Henry handed him the yellow paper.

“The staff inside the show place will let you know what’s on the menu tonight,” the man said, nodding towards the theater, from which Henry heard loud music. “Just through the metal detectors and those doors.”

The “show place” had indeed once been some sort of theater with a large stage at the far end of the room. But where there must have once been rows of auditorium seats, now round wooden tables and folding chairs filled the large room, lit by wagon

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wheel chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. Upon the stage, a woman danced to the music, holding and strategically covering her body with two large, feathery fans. A large bar stretched from one end of the wall opposite the stage to the other. Behind the bar were a mirror, rows of bottles, two bartenders, another large man dressed in black, and a young woman. Henry found an empty stool at the bar and sat down.

“What’ll it be, handsome?” the young woman behind the bar asked him. “We’re running low on ice, and we’re low on power, but we’ve got some beer that’s still cold.”

“I was thinking more of food than drinks,” Henry told her.

“What’s on the menu tonight?”

“Well, right now it’s either jackalope burgers or rabbit stew.” She looked at the expression on Henry’s face. “I recommend the jackalope burger myself. Plus, each burger comes with a lottery number for the big drawing tonight.”

“The big drawing? Is there a good prize?” Henry asked.

She nodded. “Three of them, actually: some canned fruit, a cooler or something, and—well, no one knows what the top prize is, but the Abbot promised that it’d be a good one.”

“All right,” Henry said, “but let’s make it two jackalope burgers, if they’re recommended.”

She nodded, removing from her apron and opening a notepad. “Okay—and how will you be paying for this?”

“Uh, well, I’ve still got some cash—is it any good around here? Any more, I mean?”

She looked at his face wrinkled her brow. “If you’re a serious customer, then you should offer something that still has value. Like, say,” she said, staring at his cheek, “and bandages—or other medical supplies.”

Henry searched his pockets, his mind racing. He only had his wallet and the first aid kit on him, and he didn’t want to give either of those up. He reached into his jacket, opened the first aid kit, and felt inside the case. “It’s a children’s one, ” he said, producing a single adhesive bandage, its bright neon orange color radiating through the clean, translucent paper.

“Only one bandage?” She sighed. “You expect to get two jackalope burgers with just one bandage?”

“Well, hey, it’s still sterile. See? It’s still in the package.”

“Yes, but one, Henry? And that’s a children’s sized one, too.”

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“Okay, so two then,” Henry suggested, removing another from his jacket.

“Make it five,” she said.

“Uh, how about three?” he asked. “And how about you tell me how you know my name?”

“The Abbot said you’d be here,” she said, smiling and checking something in her notepad. “And he also said you’d give up three bandages for the burgers.” She took his bandages and left with his order.

Henry directed his attention to the stage. The woman with the fans danced offstage to applause, and a line of can-can dancers stepped into view and began high kicking in ill-fitting hoop skirts and bloomers. While most of the men in the crowd hooped and hollered, Henry watched silently, waiting for his food. When their act finally finished and they ran into the wings, a slightly plump woman in a yellow dress walked onto the stage. When Henry’s jackalope burgers finally arrived on a paper plate, she had stripped down to a frayed pink bikini.

Henry had only taken two bites when he felt a presence behind him. “I was not aware that you would come this early,” a melodious voice intoned. Henry swallowed the food in his mouth and turned to see a very tall stranger behind him. He had shocking white hair, both in his rakishly groomed handlebar moustache and in the long tresses that cascaded from his head to past his shoulders, and he wore a black T-shirt, leather vest, and crisp jeans over large black boots. Furthermore, Henry also noticed two very large wings, adorned with blindingly white feathers, sprouting from the stranger’s back.

“But my foresight has always been what some of you would call ‘fuzzy,’” the stranger said, “thus making it both my curse and my blessing.”

Henry looked at the hand still on his shoulder. Even the thick hairs on his tanned hand and arm were amazingly white.

“Can I help you?” he asked the stranger.

“Sam said you would need to discuss the fee for storing your vehicle. You do remember?”

“You must be the Abbot, then?” Henry set the jackalope burger on his plate. “Pardon me if it’s rude to ask—but what’s an angel still doing here? You’re not a, um, no offense, fallen angel, are you?” he asked.

The Abbot smiled. “You do not offend. I am the Abbot— of Misrule, more specifically—and I may be fallen, but not in a

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satanic sense. While I did leave paradise and come to your realm, that was by divine providence. I came to battle the forces of darkness, which I did nobly, valiantly, and victoriously.” The Abbot looked around the room and glanced towards the stage. “The bikini that woman is wearing—tell me, is it pink? I am colorblind, and I ask for aesthetic reasons.”

“A faded pink, yes,” Henry said, taking a bite from the burger.

“Ah! Well then, that’s not the one I asked her not to wear tonight.” He gestured towards Henry’s jackalope burger. “As I was saying, while many of your peers certainly did go to their heavenly reward, many, like you, I, and the rest of this room, or this planet, this entire realm, rather, certainly did not make it heaven but remain here, neglected and apparently all but forgotten by our father.”

Henry continued eating. “Yeah, I kind of assumed something like that had happened.”

“Of course, my foresight is limited with matters celestial, at least while in this realm.” The Abbot studied Henry. “But, as for the fee for storing your vehicle, let’s make this simple for both of us.

We can spend time negotiating a price, or we can agree right now on the price we’ll end up with anyways: four aspirins, which you will remove from your jacket.”

Henry retrieved the pill bottle and carefully tipped four tablets into his palm. He then handed them to the Abbot.

“Thank you—I find that anything less than extra strength has little effect on me.” The Abbot immediately swallowed two of the pills. “This payment will cover the rest of today, tonight, and all day tomorrow. You will have to see me again should you stay any longer—but, of course, I already know that you will not.”

The Abbot rose and put his hand again on his shoulder.

“And, Henry, please forgive Rosemary for what she will do tonight.”

When Henry finished his jackalope burger, the barmaid brought him a tall glass of ice-cold beer. “Compliments of the Abbot,” she said, and pointed to Henry’s right. Henry turned and, of course, saw the Abbot sitting at a table and surrounded by some of the female performers of Dirty Jack’s. The Abbot nodded and smiled at Henry.

“He said you’d be staying for the main show,” she added.

“Would that be the ‘Foxy Boxing’?” he asked.

“Of course,” she replied. “By buying those jackalope burgers, you’ve already entered the drawing—and there’re some

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good prizes for the winner tonight.”

Henry looked again at the stage, where the dancers had been replaced by four stagehands who were assembling four turnbuckles and the accompanying ropes that would form the boxing ring in the rear center of the stage. The turnbuckles slid into holes already in the wooden stage floor, and then it was only a matter of connecting the ropes, which were apparently like, Henry observed, the red velvet queue ropes that hooked to metal posts and formed lines outside theatres.

As the four stagehands secured and checked the ropes, a younger gentleman with spiky orange hair and a manicured goatee took the stage and lifted a megaphone to his mouth. “Ladies and gentlemen, you’re here for one reason! And I’m happy to let you know that it is finally time for tonight’s main event—Foxy Boxing!”

Many of the men in the audience applauded and cheered as the announcer continued. “Tonight, once again, we have a new challenger, appearing for the first time, ready to match her skills, strength and nerves of steel against one of Dirty Jack’s very own lovely ladies!”

Two of the stagehands reappeared, each pushing a shopping cart whose contents were hidden under a large blanket.

“Before we meet our contestants, ladies and gentlemen, let’s take a look at tonight’s prizes. As you know, until a challenger defeats one of Dirty Jack’s desirable defenders in three rounds or less, the collection of prizes will remain unclaimed and continue to grow.” He held his hand out, pointing at the shopping cart to his left. “So, let’s take a look at—prize number one!” One cue, the stagehand quickly yanked the blanket off the cart, revealing several crates of canned food. “Five cases of twenty-four fifteen ounce cans of Happy Harvest cling-free peaches! Sweeter than nectar, and chock-full of vitamin C!” As the audience applauded, the announcer moved swiftly to the second shopping cart and pointed at its hidden contents. “And, if that’s not enough, we have—prize number two!” The blanket was likewise removed, revealing what looked to Henry like a three-foot tall scratched box-like kitchen appliance. “A relatively new, four cubic foot Coleman Laboratories solar-powered refrigerator/freezer! Guaranteed for as long as it works to make ice—crushed or cube—and preserve your food and keep it fresh!”

The two prizes were wheeled into the wings while the announcer walked to the center of the stage and stood in front of the boxing ring. “And, finally, ladies and gentlemen, tonight’s bonus

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prize! A one-o-a-kind, special item that, if given the chance, could save your life, lift your spirits, or win your heart! I present—prize number three!”

A large German shepherd mix, led on a leash by one of the stagehands, sauntered onto the stage and stood calmly at the announcer’s feet. As the announcer patted the dog’s head, Henry noticed the movements of a woman sitting next to the Abbot. The woman, wearing a black corset and gym shorts, suddenly rose from her seat. The Abbot placed his hand on the woman’s corseted back, but she seemed to ignore the gesture.

“This three-year old female shepherd mix comes fully and professionally trained, housebroken, and ready to serve!

Experienced with hunting and guaranteed to bear many a litter to come, Jellybean is a fantastic addition to tonight’s collection of marvelous prizes!”

“Isn’t that Natasha’s dog?” Henry heard the bar maid ask someone at the bar. As Jellybean was led offstage, the woman in the black corset was already sliding her hands into and lacing up her black boxing gloves, with the help of the other women at the Abbot’s table.

The announcer continued. “Let’s meet tonight’s fighters!

Representing Dirty Jack’s, at 5’ 6”, 120 pounds, 35-24-26, we have a frequent pretty face in the Foxy Boxing ring—everybody give it up for Natasha!”

Natasha ignored the announcer and the cheers from the audience as she climbed into the ring. In her black corset, gym shorts, dark hair pulled back into a ponytail and bare feet, Henry found her attractive yet definitely intimidating.

“But now let’s meet tonight’s challenger. From nearby Dubois, at 5’ 2”, 105 pounds, 32-22-33, battling for all of tonight’s fabulous prizes—let’s meet Rosemary!”

A red-haired woman in a blue tank top and denim shorts ran onto the stage from the wings. The audience cheered as she lifted her boxing gloves over her head, as if in anticipation of her victory. She winked at the audience and, still smiling, climbed into the wing.

“Ladies and gentleman, it’s the moment you’ve been waiting for. Let’s get ready for Foxy Boxing!”

Somewhere a bell rang, and the fight was underway. Henry watched as the two ladies circled each other cautiously, sizing each other up; they exchanged a few swings, which missed until Natasha landed a blow, delivering a jab that glanced off the left side of

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Rosemary’s head, to the excitement of the crowd. Rosemary lifted her gloves in defense, backed off, and spent the rest of the first round protecting herself from Natasha’s steady barrage.

As the bell rang and signaled the end of the first round, Henry noticed the Abbot rise and approach the stage. As most of the girls began clearing the glasses from the tables and delivering them to the bar, the Abbot said something to Natasha, who didn’t even seem to acknowledge his presence. The Abbot shrugged and left the room as the announcer with the orange hair and megaphone returned. This time, he was also carrying a tote bag.

“All right, ladies and gentlemen—time for the first drawing!” He dropped the tote bag and reached inside, pulling out a small round paper plate, like the one the jackalope burgers had been served on. “And, our first number is—87! Odd numbers go to the challenger.” Rosemary raised her arms in triumph. “Who’s got 87?”

The crowd at Dirty Jack’s flipped over their paper plates and checked the numbers written in black marker on the back. As Henry glanced at the backs of his two plates—numbers 21 and 40— another man whooped in excitement and jumped to his feet. “I got it! 87! That’s me!”

“All right,” the announcer called, “we have a potential winner! What’s your name, sir?”

“Ben—Ben Hillenmeyer,” the man shouted.

“Okay, Ben—name your attack, and if your attack succeeds in defeating Natasha, you win a free dinner at Dirty Jack’s.”

Ben thought for a moment and then spoke. “Upper cut to the chin,” he pronounced.

Rosemary flew into action, flinging her fist solidly into Natasha’s chin. Natasha, unprepared for the assault, stumbled backwards, fell clumsily and sprawled on the floor. The crowd cheered—Natasha didn’t seem to know what had hit he. Rosemary danced in victory, but Natasha slowly stumbled to the turnbuckle and pulled herself to her feet.

“And Natasha is up!” the announcer yelled. Ben laughed and took his seat, shaking his head. “All right, let’s begin round two!”

The bell rang, and Natasha came out of her corner in a fury, assaulting Rosemary, pummeling her mercilessly. The two fighters circled and pounded each other until suddenly Rosemary seemed about to fall. As she lurched against the ropes, the bell rang again. This time, Natasha continued pummeling Rosemary, until

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some stagehands physically separated them and led them to their corners.

“That’s enough for now, ladies,” the man with orange hair announced. “It’s time for drawing number two!” He reached into the tote bag. “It’s another odd number! For Rosemary, our challenger, again—number 21!”

“Come on!” Natasha yelled. “Not fair!”

Henry checked his plate again. Sure enough, it bore the number 21, in neat black marker.

“There’s a fifty-fifty chance for either fighter to be chosen,” the announcer explained, as some members of the audience began to protest Rosemary being picked twice in a row. “Chance has picked Rosemary twice. The number is 21.”

Henry stood slowly. “Uh, that’s mine—number 21.”

“We have another potential winner!” the announcer said.

“What’s your name?”

“Henry Dreyfuss.”

“Okay, Henry—you know how it works: if the attack you pick for Rosemary helps her defeat Natasha, you win.”

Henry hesitated. The only names for boxing moves he could think of were from video games—upper cut, body blow, and . . . well, that was it. The announcer seemed to notice Henry’s uncertainty and spoke up.

“Our last call was ‘upper cut to the chin.’ Now, you can stick with that choice,” he explained, and several men in the crowd booed at such a suggestion, “but custom dictates that you pick another choice: jab, cross, hook, head butt—or lady’s choice, where you let Natasha pick what she wants to do herself.”

Henry liked the idea of passing on the responsibility to someone else. “Okay, that’s what I’ll pick: lady’s choice.”

The small redhead whooped and flung off her gloves. She ran at Natasha, lunged at her legs, now clutching something small and metal, jabbed her weapon into Natasha’s left leg. Natasha cried as Rosemary traced a bloody line down Natasha’s calf, and, in an instant, thrust the bottom of her right foot into Rosemary’s chin, snapping her head back. Rosemary rolled over, dropping what Henry thought looked like a rusty corkscrew, and got to her feet.

Natasha leapt on Rosemary’s back and sank her teeth into her shoulder.

When the screaming women went down, an outburst of both cheers and boos exploded from the crowd. The stagehands reappeared and, hurtling into the ring, fought to separate the two

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women. As the curtain fell, the stagehands were attempting to drag the combatants offstage. The announcer ran in front of the descending curtain, but his attempts to calm the excited crowd were thwarted by a folding chair that was thrown and bounced off his arm.

“Remain calm!” he shouted. “Show’s over! Now clear the room! You can pick up your belongings in the lockers tomorrow!

But for now, exit the building in an orderly manner!” More stagehands arrived, now in black helmets and vests, brandished shiny nightsticks and began herding the audience towards the lobby.

Seeing the chaos erupting around the room, Henry quickly moved to the exit, following the crowd into the lobby—where he noticed that the lockers where now secured behind some sort of heavy-duty steel mesh—and outside into the darkened street, lit by a few storefront lanterns and the stars and moon above.

As he moved away from the theater and down the street, he felt a large hand on his arm. He turned and was confronted by a large, dark-skinned man with a shaved head. “So who the fuck won?” he demanded. Henry smelled rank beer on his breath. “I had a lot of goddamn supplies riding on that fight.”

“I dunno,” Henry offered. The large man stared silently and did not let go. “Maybe they’ll disqualify the girl with the weapon, though.”

“Why the fuck did you say ‘lady’s choice’?” The large man squeezed Henry’s arm. “The Abbot said you’d do that! Do you know how much that’ll cost me?”

“Sorry,” Henry said.

The large man suddenly and viciously drove his fist into the neon green bandage on Henry’s face Henry went down. As he fumbled unsuccessfully for the gun in his holster, which he suddenly remembered wasn’t actually there, he heard the large man mutter, “Says he sorry!” and watched him walk away and disappear in the crowds.

“You get the hell out of here!” a stagehand in full riot gear told Henry, helping him to his feet. Henry pushed the stagehand away and left Dirty Jack’s, heading towards the security of his locked car. The cool night air chilled his skin, and as he touched his hand to his now tender face, Henry felt moist warmth—blood. Removing the index card from his pocket, he approached the wooden hut in the town square.

“Can I help you?” asked a thin woman, in buckskins

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identical to Sam’s, as she stepped out of the hut. Henry could hear a couple of other people talking softly inside the makeshift wooden office. The woman looked concernedly at Henry’s face. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I just need to get something out of my car,” Henry said, offering her the card. “Can I have my keys?”

“Uh, yeah. Hold on.” She took his card and stepped into the hut. A moment later, she reappeared. “Bring the keys back, or it’ll get towed. Oh, and there’s no sleeping allowed in any parked vehicle,” she told him as she handed the keys over. Henry nodded, then crossed the street and crept towards his parked Endeavor. He opened the passenger door, got inside, shutting the door behind him. Twelve seconds later, the interior was plunged into darkness.

Henry tapped the light above, and, in the semi-lightened vehicle, he climbed over the seat and found the bag containing butterfly strips, disinfectant, and gauze pads. Using the rear view mirror, he removed the neon bandage, cleaned the cut beneath his eye, and applied the strips. While there’d probably be a scar, Henry thought it would probably be a small one. But what did it really matter? Who amongst us was flawless?

Henry climbed into the back seat and stored his supplies.

While it was slightly cool inside the vehicle, Henry considered for a moment disobeying the woman from the hut and spending the night in his Endeavor. If he reclined the front passenger seat, he could probably sleep somewhat comfortably—at least till dawn roused him.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sharp knock on his window. Outside, he saw the silhouetted figure of a woman.

Prepared to explain that he was most certainly not sleeping in his Endeavor, he opened the door.

“I thought you might be here,” the woman said. But it was Natasha, wearing a black leather jacket, long dark skirt, boots and a stocking cap. “Look, I need your help,” she told him and paused, resting her hand on the seat of the Endeavor. “Can you help me?”

“What do you mean?” Henry asked her. She looked down and bit her lip. “Here, get in,” he told her, moving over and making room for Natasha.

Natasha slowly climbed in and sat beside Henry. As she crossed her legs, she carefully guarded the bandaged section of her calf with her hand. “I can walk on it fine, but the cut still hurts— and it looks pretty bad.”

Henry examined her leg. The bandage looked like a section

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of a torn white bed sheet, and it was held it place with silver duct tape. He touched the smooth skin of her leg and began to carefully remove the tape. “What did that other girl have, some sort of weapon?”

Natasha nodded. “A corkscrew.” She shook her head. “I should have never agreed to the match. But I wanted Jellybean— that’s my dog.” Henry peeled the rest of the duct tape off her leg, and Natasha grimaced as the adhesive tore from her skin. “The Abbot had Doc Lowell look at the cut, and he did wash it, but did you see that corkscrew? It was rusty. Can’t a girl get lockjaw or something from a rusty weapon like that?”

Henry nodded. “Yeah, a person could contract tetanus— but the chances are probably slim that you have.” As he removed the bandage, Henry softly touched the reddened skin surrounding her wound. “I’d be more likely to believe that your cut’s infected.”

“Listen, I know you’re a doctor, and I know you’ve got medicine and supplies that could probably help me. Sam told me you’ve got hypodermic needles, so go ahead and give me a tetanus shot—I don’t think I’ve had one since I was a kid.” She looked into his eyes. “I’ll be in your debt.”

Henry hesitated. “Sam told you?”

“He goes through everybody’s vehicles when they park here. But he says he never takes anything.”

Henry had been the one who had asked for the “lady’s choice”—plus, hadn’t she just say, “I’ll be in your debt”? That statement seemed intriguing.

Henry retrieved the hypodermic needles, and Natasha turned on her side, hiking her skirt up past her hips. He swabbed her now exposed thigh and administered both the tetanus and the penicillin shots.

“Thank you,” Natasha said, getting out of the Endeavor and smoothing her skirt. Henry stepped outside, locked his vehicle and slammed the door.

“You needn’t return the keys, Dr. Dreyfuss.” Henry turned and saw the Abbot, standing on the sidewalk, leading Jellybean on a leash. The dog stood calmly next to the angel. “I suppose I should not be pleased with you Natasha, as you failed to throw that fight— as we agreed you would.”

“Jellybean was never supposed to be part of the deal,” she said, kneeling and stroking the dog’s head. Jellybean licked her face.

“And what about Rosemary trying to kill me? You must have known that would happen—and you never told me. I might even

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suspect you put her up to it!”

“If I wanted you dead, Natasha, it would be done.” He studied Natasha, who put her hands in the pockets of her jacket.

“You need not fear for your life. In the future, I see you very much alive—and very far away from here,” he said.

“Oh, really?” she asked.

“Actually, I see two possibilities,” the Abbot said. “One, you use that gun in your jacket, Natasha, and shoot me and whoever gets in your way; Henry, his weapon in a locker in Dirty Jack’s, gets wounded; and, Jellybean runs away, never to be found.

Many people get caught up in the gunfire and killed,” he said, glancing towards the woman in buckskins, who was sweeping the sidewalk in front of the hut. “Or two, I convince you to abandon this foolish plan, and I simply accept that I must watch you two drive away—with Jellybean, of course—allowing me to keep whatever you leave behind, for my troubles.”

Henry looked at Natasha, and from her expression, he knew they had little choice.

“The second option helps me to prolong my reign as Abbot of Misrule, so I like it better—don’t you?” He handed the leash to Natasha. “I will need your locker key, Dr. Dreyfuss.”

Henry found the key and handed it over. “It would be horrible to have people killed,” he said to her.

The Abbot nodded. “It would be if anyone cared about them.”

Henry watched Natasha push Jellybean into the back seat and then sit in the passenger seat. Henry climbed inside, fastened his seat belt, and as he started the engine, Jellybean clumsily leapt into his lap and licked his bandaged face.

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Christina Kubasta

The New House In your locked rooms a chequered grip, some mud, and other things, never mentioned.

Perhaps the purple-blue hue cheeks turned again & again like a biblical injunction.

You’ve given me keys, and I’ve published the contents, with or without accompanying photographs.

So now we make an offer, write in the side-by-side with automatic ice maker, four top gas range, gleaming white.

In my own rooms wait only dust, all ghosts given up, at one time or another, but not yet to you. We’ll share the furnace maintenance; You’ll hang frames & fight with plaster.

I’ll snake a drain from time to time.

My coffee bean child ground back down, you’re next in line sometimes.

I’m rereading Plath.

No word rhymes with chimney.

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S.D. Dillon

On Site Earplugs only dull the sound as salt-skimmed asphalt a blade.

Metal-smoke pierces my sinuses as sparks bouquet from a welding iron. I shift between coils & assembly lines forklifts & palettes of car frames where men tend fumes & fire.

Someone’s brother almost-pauses, peering through his welding mask not curious or unweary enough of this visitor to register— then turns back to pounding out parts.

Aware of safety glasses, I move my feet look at my meter. Sunlight beams in from a loading dock and the midwinter light fools me.

For an instant I think it’s spring out there.

For an instant I don’t think I don’t know what work is.

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Mark Matson

Sa 06/09/2007 4:30pm I. as they focused on her ear with a lense I was dazzled by the taste of her knees & smell of her nose & thought about their effects: as she echoed with resonance parts vibrating at (to) the touch

fitores &

bow bow triple-coloured bow bow to/associations (unsparingly critical) spiritual correspondences sympathetic clairvoyance & forms under the influence: elusive shapes in dull pigments— consequences are for the aesthetes II. as time went on words simply became colour & clearer non-representational language they ran together toward obscure words & longer words that stand near them III. as steel blue in my mind sz sz twinkling in violet & green carrying tunes I love most vivid mental pictures when I listen in French plotting perhaps the arc of a rainbow

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R 06/14/07 2:00pm subtle autonomous light light at the height of darkness sensible & measurable datum applied to places we’ll never go exiguous diachronic brightness versus hue that is—to the surface not the substance but what? in proportion we do not see them as they are if they’re there at all we see them all mixed up with colour we see them all mixed up with light we see them all mixed up with shadow we see them all as all so different we see them all as they aren’t at all laden with particular emphasis the horizon lies

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Clare Christina

goodbye is this how water feels when it falls and pieces of it scatter light this pool of water write a formula that yields no remnant I built a tiny boat out of a matchbox I can sail or I can burn I can go limp, be carried by cool tides drag my feet, cast sparks consume with my heat I wanted to be an orange cool and aflame to be a red ocean a red sea and then part of me to be a little god, kiss driftwood and make it a tree burn my cross to white ash blow it, it is your birthday

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the garden the devil became like the old mother of a beautiful girl the beautiful girl is bound by a love like a rope to her snake-mother and must obey and mother knows the way to possess this form is to lock it up with hooks and snaps and to take it out sometimes this she learned from her father the miser getting off on his gold but in the Garden, with humanity just beginning the devil made it up as he went along in his head, he made a quick sketch of Genesis and played it backward seduce the human body with itself its own taste, touch, smell—its own hunger offer food to the animal and when it comes close enough eat it so there’s the woman, she ain’t been around much and she wouldn’t mind eating off a new tree the rest—I'd say the rest is history, but it’s just the Bible

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reading aesop the boy who cries wolf stops crying to weary himself with his father’s sheep and the lioness wins the contest for the choicest piece of shit if not the biggest; the cock finds a jewel among the litter but would rather it were corn— keep a part of each to be a better person flatter a friend, read a story before dismissing do something nice and get your head bit off; let a lion live and save yourself, a mouse (a low creature, an ugly illustration, a beet’s ass scraggly with a root-tail); save your dog then throw him in a well— don’t bite the hand of the naked man don’t contradict if you’ve any morals at all

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Amy Irish

A Destined Shore “Wild Nights! Wild Nights!” – Emily Dickinson Nothing –- No one –- preordained Cold daylight calmly states The Lunar Seas are dead –- Are Dust –No Breath –- No Touch –- No Taste But once asleep –- the ocean Wakes –Pounding Blood beat –- Heart fed Waves And Swim –- I must in this Wild Unknown And Reach –- My Promised Fate Destiny is out of season Still –- I seek a Destined Shore –Fiercely led –- by Seas of Fire –Nights that Breathe –- Your Name –- And More –-

Birthsong In the soundless compression of space Your murmur––radio transmission Promising life––pierces atmosphere, splashes down In a primordial sea, swimming below the surface.

Your sonar echoes these depths, finds Fertile soil. Then the sound Explodes. Your densely packed voice expands–– Saturn’s rings, the storms of Venus.

A planet ripe with child, sparked By the rich fire released from your throat.

Plant that seed deep. And when life Rises, raw and wet, to the surface –– it will sing.

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Tom Miller

Oakum’s Razor “A tree, finding water, pierces roof and solves a mystery.”

--From the notebook of F. Scott Fitzgerald She’s here about a case. Dressed too formally for a casual walk, tights and a little blue jacket despite the dry California heat. A looker. As a sapling I would have made a move and she’d have chopped me down with a glance.

“I’m looking for Manfred Oakum,” she says.

“That’s me,” I say.

“They didn’t tell me you’re a tree.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Not really. It takes all sorts, I suppose.”

“Some of your best friends are trees?”

“No. I haven’t had much use for trees. Until now. It’s about my sister. Thalia Hudson. She’s… that is to say, she was…”

“Had her throat slit. Franklin Avenue, two houses down.

Nasty business.”

“What do you know about it?” she asks sharply.

“It’s my habit to know everything that happens on my block. Not that you could have missed it, the way the bulls were crawling over that place.”

“They went over that house top to bottom,” she says. “Not a shred of evidence. Not one darn shred.” She’s about to add something, but instead dabs at her eyes with a handkerchief. I get a clear look: no wedding band.

“So, you want to hire me to investigate your sister’s murder?” I ask.

“I want Dennis Halket hung out to dry,” she snaps.

That takes the green out of my leaves. “Halket has friends in high places,” I say.

“He’s his own best friend,” she says. “And it doesn’t go any higher.”

“State Police Commissioner is plenty high,” I agree. “But not untouchable. He and your sister went together, if memory serves. I saw them a few times.”

“He proposed. Thalia turned him down. Denny was mad as heck. Mad enough to fix her.”

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“The local cops liked him as a suspect,” I say. “But Halket had an ironclad alibi. He was presiding over the California State Police Ball that night. Nothing would make a conviction stick short of his fingerprints on the murder weapon. And I doubt Halket would have left it lying around like an acorn in January.”

“That’s just the sort of thing Denny would do!” she cries.

“He bragged to me about hiding the knife in that house. But no one can find it. Not the bulls, not the feds, nobody.”

“What makes you think I can?”

“You cracked the Desoto case. The papers called you a hero.”

“I don’t care much for newspapers, Miss Hudson. Not unless they’re shredded and mixed with mulch for aeration.”

“Will you take the case?”

“Sure,” I say. “My rate’s $2 a day plus expenses.”

“That’s practically nothing!”

“It’s enough to hire a gardener to water me once a week and fertilize a couple times a year. But fair warning—I work slow.

Could be months, maybe a year or longer. Are you in for the duration?”

“I’ll pay any amount for the truth,” she says.

“Nobody wants the truth,” I say. “You said it yourself—you want Halket hung out to dry.” * A crime investigates itself. Let it be known you’re interested in someone, he comes to talk. Takes years, sometimes, but everybody comes eventually.

The medical examiner drops past with Thalia’s autopsy results. She died around 10 pm. No signs of forced entry, no defensive wounds. Two incisions across the windpipe, though the first was deep enough to kill. Sloppy. Amateur’s work. But a very sharp instrument all the same, not an ordinary knife. Surgical scalpel, maybe. Bruising on the left ring finger, post-mortem. She was twelve weeks pregnant.

Then Thalia’s neighbor visits. Says she saw a short, paunchy man in a white suit skulking around on the night of the murder. He rang the doorbell and went inside at 9:30. She didn’t see him come out.

I’ve heard worse descriptions of Dennis Halket.

I put out word I want to see him. * When Halket shows, he’s wearing his trademark white linen

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suit, well cut. His hair’s retreated a few inches since I saw him last, but he moves with the same smarter-than-thou carriage, shoulders thrown back and chin jutting forward. Halket walks up to me, rather than driving. He, at least, respects the old forms. You don’t stick your head out a motorcar window to speak with a tree any more than you’d ride a bicycle through your doctor’s office.

“Hello, Manny,” he says. “Care for a drink?”

“Always,” I say. Halket turns on the spigot on my property and sucks at the nozzle in that sloppy human way. When he’s done, he lays the hose on the ground. The drink hits me immediately, a slug of cold liquid that focuses my thoughts.

“To what do I owe the honor, Commissioner?” I ask.

He looks puzzled. “Manny, I know you trees aren’t much good with time, but I’m retired.”

It must be a couple decades since I saw him. It’s not that I don’t notice the passage of time, but humans move so damn fast.

“I’ll put this to you point-blank,” Dennis says. “Your investigation is beyond an embarrassment. I should have visited earlier, but it’s a long drive from Sacramento. And I was hurt you’d be so indiscreet with an old colleague’s reputation at stake.”

“If it makes you feel better,” I say, “I’ve never thought of you as a colleague.”

Halket slaps a hand against my trunk and leaves it there. “I did not kill that girl. Three hundred people saw me at the Ball, all of them cops or captains of industry. If you live to see the Apocalypse, you’ll never prove otherwise.”

Dennis removes his hand. “Let me tell you something else.

It was your investigation that forced me out. Twenty years of questions and insinuations. The governor finally decided he’d had enough. He offered me a sweetheart deal—resign to quiet things down and come back as a private consultant, triple pay. But your continued interest is threatening that arrangement. So let me propose something. Come work for me. Good cases. No interference. Investigate at your own pace. Nice paycheck.”

I may not have an olfactory system, but I know when a deal stinks like rotten cedar.

“Just quit the Hudson case, right?” I ask.

Dennis pulls off his sunglasses and wipes the sweat from around his eye sockets. “Know much about aquifers?” he asks.

“Sure. The water table lies twenty-three feet below me. It’s receded the past ten years.”

“Very nice. But did you know I’m majority owner of a

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company called Hydro-Lite? Bottled water. We’re discussing digging wells, maybe on the abandoned property on Boyd St. Hate to think what that would do to the groundwater around here. Life’s hard enough for you trees.”

I try not to laugh. “Halket, I didn’t get to be a historic landmark by rolling over every time some fifth-rate copper applied the heat. Dropping cases is bad for business. Even you should understand that.”

Halket re-buttons his jacket. “Good business means not cutting off your branch to spite your trunk, Manfred. The offer’s still on the table. Very lucrative. Very smart.”

Halket reaches down and tightens the nozzle of the hose until only a thin stream of water trickles out. From behind his sunglasses he grins. * Five years pass for me in the time it takes to shed a tear, a decade in the space of a daydream. It takes me nearly that long to realize Halket’s serious. The wells are dug, the aquifers drop. It’s dry times.

Yet, I need the water more than ever. There’s one last witness I need a word with. So, I pay for round-the-clock watering.

A small fortune, but I’ve invested wisely and can afford it. For a while.

I throw all my resources behind one root, inching toward Thalia’s old place. Through the foundation, up among the cinderblocks and finally into contact with the solid hardwood frame at 137 Franklin.

Trees can see while they’re alive—I’ve always seen unusually well for a tree—and deadwood, though it’s blind, has an extraordinary sense of touch. Now it’s just a matter of interrogating every inch of lumber in the house. What the fine parquet floor in the living room felt on the night of the murder, I can feel, too: It’s cold, creaky evening. The front door opens. Two sets of feet. One warm, barefoot. Thalia. The other is the murderer. 130 pounds, judging by the infinitesimal bend in the floorboards. The weight is distributed oddly—feels like stiletto heels.

But the floor is annoyed with me. It keeps pushing my consciousness toward the attic, where I finally realize the floor extends too far past the wall in one spot. Plywood of a different weight—blue spruce. Notches. A false space. Inside, a metallic object with a mahogany handle. That’s good—mahogany’s notoriously chatty. Something’s traced on it—bloodstains. Whorls.

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Fingerprints. The handle describes every last line. The pattern is familiar, it’s slapped my own trunk.

Just like Miss Hudson said: a big kitchen knife with Halket’s fingerprints. Simple if you know where to look.

But the mahogany handle isn’t finished talking. In fact, it’s only getting started. * Miss Hudson visits, as I’ve requested. She drives up in an enormous motorcar, the front grille big enough to breakfast on redwoods, and rolls down the window. She’s as hard and shriveled as a walnut.

“What’s this about?” she asks. “Didn’t I pay on time this month?”

“Sure,” I say. “But I’m more interested in where you were the night Thalia was murdered.”

“How could I possibly remember? That was—sixty years ago? Sixty-five?”

“You can’t remember where you were when you learned your sister was dead?”

“I don’t remember anything anymore!”

“Let me refresh your memory,” I say. “You were in love with Dennis Halket, carrying on with him behind your sister’s back.

Hell, maybe Halket even loved you too, but when Thalia got pregnant, he proposed to her. She said yes. Not long after, Dennis invited you over for dinner to break things off. He sliced his thumb chopping onions and bled on the knife. While he was bandaging his hand in the bathroom, an idea hit you. You shoved the knife in your purse.”

“You don’t know any of that.”

“Sure, I do. I have a witness. He was still hidden away in your handbag when you bought a straight razor a few days later.

Then you dressed up in one of those absurd white suits Dennis favors. He’d left one at your place once that you’d never gotten around to returning. You made sure Thalia’s neighbor saw you outside—she knew how Halket dressed and with heels you’re just his height. But she didn’t stop to think you were wearing a summerweight suit in midwinter.”

“Stop it!”

“You slipped inside and cut your sister’s throat. Yanked off her engagement ring. You stashed the knife with Halket’s prints in the secret compartment in the attic. Of course, you knew that compartment was no secret. Thalia bragged about it to anybody

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who passed through her living room—it tickled her. You thought it was a cinch the police would check there. But the bulls worked like they always do—too fast. They never looked. So you hired me, hoping I’d find the knife and dig no further.”

“I have a simpler explanation,” Hudson says. “Denny Halket killed my sister. Isn’t that what you trees say—the simplest solution is the correct one?”

“The simplest solution that accounts for all the facts. Yours doesn’t.”

“You can’t call floorboards as witnesses,” she says. “You can’t depose ceiling joists.”

“Maybe not,” I say. “But I can make insinuations. I could make your life hell.”

“What would that accomplish?” she says. “Thalia’s dead.

Denny’s dead. My doctors say I have six months.”

“Come clean to the cops,” I say. “It’ll give you peace.”

“You cold unfeeling thing,” she spits. “I hope you rot!”

She’s more right than she knows. The carpenter ants are already working on me. My vision’s fading. But I confessed my sins long ago. The Great Investigator in the Sky has nothing on me. And when I come back in the next life as an ottoman or bookshelves or landscaping fill, I’ll do what I’ve always done, but from a thousand places at once.

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Dawn M. Comer

The Thing Is… Author’s Note: What you are about to read may well disturb you, but Arabella Cosa’s experience of life at “The THING? Mystery of the Desert” is by no means exceptional. Alienation accompanied by an innate sense of difference, even freakishness are, after all, common traits of Tourist Attraction Trauma. What does distinguish Arabella’s story (or to be more specific, “letter”) from other accounts gathered by the National Association of Tourist Attraction Survivors, is her acute awareness of her confused situation as brought upon by and verbalized to a tourist outsider.

NATAS believes that without this person (believed to be “I.M. Luvlee,” writer of “Songs Sung in the Desert” which has also been reprinted here), Arabella would never have reached this selfawareness, would never have shared her story, and would never have left any clue as to her disappearance and untimely death.

Tragically, this letter was found alongside Arabella’s body in a remote desert area some fifteen miles from her home. *** “Death in the Desert,” Arizona Range News, June 23, 2005 The body of sixteen-year-old Arabella Buena Cosa was discovered in the San Pedro desert on Tuesday evening, June 22, by Dragoon police detective Lucian Romero.

Cosa’s parents, Isabella and Bill Cosa, had reported Arabella missing the night of June 21. Father Bill Cosa had told police that Arabella had left at sunrise that morning, telling them “she was just going to ‘commune with the desert,’ which sounded kind of odd to us but, well, that’s just Arabella for you.”

Mother Isabella Cosa declined to comment.

In a press conference this morning, Detective Romero described the body of Arabella Cosa as “reverently mutilated.” When asked what that looked like, Romero shrugged and said, “Well, parts of the

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body had been cut off, but very purposefully. They just were not there anymore.” Cosa’s appearance, Romero said, was “placid, almost holy” despite the mutilation.

Further investigations, Romero said, will focus on “a letter to an unknown ‘dear one’” believed to be I.M. Luvlee of Cleveland, Ohio, found in the “neatly folded pile of clothes” near the body. Romero declined to comment about the cause of death, other than to say that “no evidence exists of an outside perpetrator.”

Arabella Cosa was born in Dragoon, Arizona, on December 21, 1988. She attended Dragoon High School where she was a member of her school’s National Honor Society chapter and also worked at the family business, “The THING? Mystery of the Desert,” 2631 Johnson Road, Dragoon.

My dear one, “Once there lived a queen in a palace of bones in the middle of a desert.”

So began your story. Now I will share mine.

Once, just once, I would like to keep a friend for more than forty-five minutes. But I live at the home of “The THING?” and people just keep moving on, moving through. Men, women, children, all pay their dollar to walk through my dad’s long metal sheds, enduring all the weird stuff he takes care of, enduring the bad “The THING is” jokes, enduring it all just so they can get to “The THING,” the Thing of all things that has been waiting for them at the end. And when they reach that Thing they are always disgusted, every one of them. I have seen them recoil, have listened to their conversations, have heard the same lines over and over and over again.

“Grotesque!” declares the man, looking down through the plexiglass case.

“Certainly is!” says the woman beside him.

“Why would anybody want to own such a thing, let alone display it?” the man says, turning away. “It’s so shriveled up, so ugly.”

“Why,” says the woman, peering down through the plexiglass, “I can’t even tell if it’s a man or a woman.” She leans in

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for a closer look. Looks away. Leans in again. “Honey, do you think it’s real? A real person?”

“Sure it’s real,” the man, walking away from the case and towards the exit, calls back. “What kind of a freak would fake such a thing?”

The woman takes one last look, shivers, shrugs, and follows.

And then they are gone, having spent a dollar to see The Thing they do not like, The Thing they do not want to understand.

Everybody who has ever stopped to see The Thing while passing by Dragoon, Arizona, on I-10, has walked through my backyard. In the rectangle of land surrounded by my dad’s corrugated metal sheds are trailers; I live with my parents in the pale cream-colored one with the brown shutters and the three spindly trees in front, one with half its limbs missing, bearing just a couple off-balanced branches of green. When families pass through the sheds, I “psst!” at the kids and sometimes get them to leave their parents and spend a little time with me. “Do you live here?” they all ask in wonder, thinking that living in a trailer must be so weird. And when I say that I do and ask if they want to meet my pet snake Molly, they always say yes because, if I’ve gotten them to come and talk to me in the first place, I know that they are the ones brave enough to stick around.

I know, though, that I am just a freak show for these wouldbe-friends, a thing to talk about when they go back to their schools at the end of summer. For the kids who live around me, with whom I go to school, I am also a freak, and my whole family with our boa constrictor Molly and our alligators and Dad’s “Very Special Exhibit depicting ancient methods of torture,” is a freak family. It’s kind of fun being a freak family during the summer when most of the tourists go through, because people like freaks in small doses.

But during the rest of the year when I’m at school, being a freak who is part of a bigger freak family is no fun at all.

At school, I’m either teased or avoided. Though I’ve hardened myself against responding, the teasing still bothers me, and I hate the names my classmates call me, names set up to humiliate me and my family. Trailer trash. Mummy fuckers.

Everything in-between. I eat my lunch alone, and after lunch I sit alongside the other misfits on the gym bleachers and read books about other places and times than Dragoon, Arizona in 2005.

Sometimes I even create new places in my head or write them out on paper, places where nobody gets left out of basketball games or

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lunch table conversations, swordfights or dragon racing. Nobody.

Not even me.

But more than being teased at school, I hate being avoided, overlooked, invisible. This is less the case with my classmates than with my teachers and has been for a very long time. My secondgrade teacher Miss Stumpt was the first to tell my mother that I was smart, “gifted” even, the first in a long line of teachers to send me to the library when I had finished with class work, the first to leave my education up to me. And I liked going to the library, liked reading all I could get my hands on, but I never did like having no one with whom to discuss what I had read.

But in the summer when there is no school, none of this matters. I have no history with the tourists, no context for them to judge me so readily, no risk to have to take, and if I want, I can play up being a freak in ways that may not be wholly true but that give them something by which to remember me. So the kids—whether six or sixteen—who pass through during the summer, who follow me to play Frisbee in the yard or even come into my trailer, they give me somebody to talk to and to listen to, if only for a little while.

And when they leave, I can, if I want, imagine what it would have been like if they could have stayed longer, to actually count them as friends. Most times, though, I don’t bother since none leave much of an impression and more are coming through all the time. So most times this not-keeping-a-friend thing doesn’t matter so much to me.

Most times I’m ok with forty-five minute friendships.

Last Wednesday, though, last Wednesday was different.

The Thing is, I loved you and you left. I understand you didn’t have a choice, that your parents moved you on, that even if you had been in control you still would have left because leaving would have been the best thing for you, that Dragoon, Arizona, has nothing to offer a teenager from Cleveland, Ohio. I understand all that. But, still, the Thing is, I love you and I can’t get rid of that.

The Thing, this Thing, is a monster. Had I just never met you I would have been relatively okay with who I was. I took a certain pride in belonging to a family that, by choice of location and occupation, set themselves apart as freaks. I took a certain pride in being set apart in that way, and that unusual pride helped me to explain to myself why I was always so out of place, so out of sync with the rest of the world. My pride was a defense mechanism, to be sure, but most days it worked to keep me from utter despair. Within my family I at least thought I had a place—surely I could play the

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role of freak as well as they—but had you asked, I could not have said what that place was exactly, how I fit into this attraction my parents maintained for all the world to see. But as I had never thought about all these things, really, my life was not so very bad—it felt comfortably unnatural and abnormal, like the life of a child whose parents run a tourist trap should feel.

But then you came walking through my backyard, catching my attention before I could catch yours, and you smiled at me and waved, and I smiled and waved back. We sat beneath the half-tree beside my trailer, and there you read to me a story you had written about a queen who ruled a desert from her palace of bones, and I swore I could have written it too. My too-small world expanded, all my defenses fell away, and I loved you more deeply than all the books I’ve read, more deeply than I love my parents, more deeply even than I love my pet snake Molly. Within minutes of meeting, even before the start of your story, my heart lurched and I knew, just knew, that this was it, that this was the Thing I’d forever been waiting for. And I loved you. But I didn’t know how much until you left.

When you left and my mind wandered to think of you, I had this deep ache and thrill all at once, like I had been punched in the gut with something I’d always wanted. I could not have you.

That much I knew. I could never even contact you, as I didn’t know your address, your phone number, your email, or even your name.

You had said you would give all that to me, but by the time you were prepared to do so, your parents had seen the Thing at the end of it all, and I knew from their pale unsettled faces that they had hated what they had seen as much as they claimed to love you, so there by the half-tree in front of the door to my trailer, they snatched you away, insisted the time to leave was now, and you were gone.

And when I went back to my trailer and slumped onto the couch in front of the turned-off TV, knowing my life would never be the same, knowing I would surely die in this desert place all alone, all my mother could say was that I needed to get off my butt and get busy cleaning Hitler’s car before the lunch hour was over.

Even though I am one in a family of supposed freaks, since meeting you I can verbalize at least one thing that sets me apart as a different sort of freak from the rest of them. I want to create other lives, other worlds, out of words. I want to imagine worlds greater than my own, live out lives that have both more and less promise

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than my own. I want to escape into somebody else’s mind, body, and soul, if only for a short while. I think I’ve actually known all this for a long time, but since meeting you I can put words to this longing. I want to be—no, I am by my very nature—a writer.

Still, I know that this is not acceptable to a mother who is a freak only to the extent that she can profit from it, putting on her desert mystery goddess routine as she sells dollar tickets to The Thing, as many as three hundred on a good day. And this is not acceptable to a father who believes the only lives and worlds worth knowing and living are the ones we have been given, the physical ones grounded in the here and now. In my father’s view, the only worthwhile way to be a freak is to collect freaky objects and display them for people to look at and say, “Wow! Whoever runs this place must be a real freak!” never realizing he’s just a businessman with unusual merchandise.

It’s not that I can’t appreciate my father’s decision to buy The Thing years ago, that I can’t appreciate his interest in preserving curiosities and oddities. I can appreciate his interest; I just can’t keep his distance. While my father can keep from seeing his strange driftwood monsters with their contorted forms and blazing red lips as anything more than strange pieces of driftwood with faces painted on, I can’t. I see the monsters in my nightmares, see them take on lives of their own and use their big red mouths to devour all that I love. Sometimes I even think I understand them.

As for Molly, dad likes her because she’s a big boa constrictor and people like to look at big boa constrictors, and mom likes Molly because drawing people in results in more money. I like Molly because she can do what I cannot—she can swallow other creatures whole. I feed her whole live wriggling rats and watch as she swallows them down. Sometimes she curls herself into a tight circle, mouth resting on her tail, and I have wondered lately what would happen if she took to swallowing herself whole.

That’s what I want to do, devour myself. I cannot do what I imagine Molly could if she had the will to, so instead I want to carve up my flesh and swallow the pieces down bit by bit until nothing remains. To be my own source of nourishment. To need nothing but me to become nothing. As best I can recall, Narcissus looked at his reflection, fell in love, fell in, and drowned, but he is not me. Not by a long shot. Facing my own face in the mirror is something I’ve never been able to do, my eyes always averting my eyes, so the fate of Narcissus will not be my fate. No. I want to disappear, to absolve myself for loving you too

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much and myself too little. I have taken small cuttings from unseen places—my thighs, my buttocks, my breasts—have tasted my own blood, have felt on my tongue the smooth slick texture of my own flesh, my own blood. Cannibalism? No. This is communion. Flesh becomes bread, blood becomes wine. The ultimate feast. I forgive my own sins even as I commit them. The ultimate redemption.

I recognize that pain is an impediment, but pain can be conquered. There are ways to numb the nerves, certainly, but if I am to eat myself alive, I must be open to the pain, to the full reality of what I am doing. I will confess, too, that such a communion raises practical concerns, that at some point I can’t help but fail, will be unable to surpass my humanness. After all, even if I start with the surface flesh and move on slowly towards the most important organs, at some point I will die and leave part of me behind. Maybe at the moment of eating my own heart. Maybe at the brain. At some point, this communion feast will fail and I will die, leaving flesh and blood and brain and heart, unable to eat any more. And even as I do commune upon myself, my body will war against me, seeing to its own repairs, its own regeneration, even as I long for, work for, my own end.

This reality frustrates me beyond reason. I have tried and tried and tried to think of some method by which I can have everything end up even with, at best, only my jawbone remaining as evidence of my former existence. Like in IQ where you jump pegs with pegs in an effort to end up with only one, the rest cleared off the stubbly board. But even when you win the game, there’s still always one left. One damn plastic peg left standing alone on the board.

This much I know: In this communion feast, I must be alone. No sharing of body and blood, no passing of bread and cup, no public declaration that I’m part of any greater body, that I’m sharing this meal with anybody but myself. It must just be me, alone, in private, in a closet somewhere or under some stairs or hiding in my locker after school has ended, someplace where there is room only for me and a blade. Even better, out in the desert, the blazing sun my only companion, drying me out even as I bleed myself dry. Nothing to hide me from all who will not pass by. For my communion, there can be no separation of body and blood, no separation between blood shed and body broken. Instead, there is only bloodandbody, inseparable, indivisible, both for me and from me for never and ever, amen.

I look at The Thing in my father’s shed and see a shriveled

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up body, blood and fluids gone, leathery flesh remaining and, beneath the flesh, giving the flesh shape, brittle bone. Somebody long ago sucked life from it somehow, but such an end is not for me.

I want all of me gone, especially flesh and blood—that’s the only way to make communion work. If anything has to remain, let it be bone. Let it be my skeleton. Let it be that frame on which rests all that matters least to me.

And what has any of this to do with you? You whom I love?

Nothing. Maybe nothing. But maybe, just maybe, everything. I must believe this has everything to do with you. I must believe you would understand what I am saying, that you would have thought the same thoughts, felt the same feelings. In that deepest part of me that not even I can know, I am convinced that this must be the case. I just want the pain of loving and losing you to go away.

I am more than just a freak. I am sick. I know that. I read what I have written and I try and wrap my mind around this selfcommunion thing, and I know that I am sick with no chance of a cure. I am a freak in the way the rest of my family is not. I cannot market my freakishness for money or turn it into a sideshow or advertise it on billboards, and as much as I’d like to, I cannot take it on and off to suit business hours. I know that at the very core of who I am, I am a sick, sick freak in a way that my family could not even begin to comprehend. This is why I must consume myself, must practice self-communion until nothing remains. Oh, that I could only succeed! That such a thing were possible!

The thing is, I love you and you left.

The thing is, I do not know who I am apart from you.

The thing is, I am also glad you left. Your leaving was best for us both. For what if I had wanted to devour you instead of me?

And so I am writing you this letter you will never read because I must. Maybe it doesn’t matter that you will never read it, that I will never again see you. Maybe what matters is that I am writing, that I met you, that I have changed—no, not changed… become aware—because of you. But right now I’m in this awful stuck place; I can’t move backward, and I can’t move forward, and all I can think to do is erase myself from where I am.

The following story, believed to have been written by the addressed of Arabella Cosa’s letter, was first published under the (presumed) pseudonym “I.M. Luvlee” in The Cleveland Quarterly’s annual “Youth Make a Difference” issue (Spring 2004, Volume XIV, Issue 1).

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“Songs Sung in the Desert”

by I.M. Luvlee Once there lived a queen in a palace of bones in the middle of a desert.

Queen Dessicada ruled over dry things and dead things, over cacti and corpses. This, though, was not as it had always been.

Ages ago she began her reign as Queen Succulent and she ruled over a verdant rainforest full of waterfalls, fruit trees, and subjects— animal and human alike—who loved her most dearly. Queen Succulent reigned with such kindness and generosity over her lands, and her subjects loved and trusted her and each other so much that they linked arms and legs, mouths and belly buttons, breasts and elbows, and became a living, breathing, palace of flesh surrounding the Queen whom they loved.

All was well in Queen Succulent’s lands for many a year until one day a witch whose vision was poor entered into the land and did not like what she saw. Where everybody else saw a palace whose very walls pulsed with joyous life, the witch saw only a magnification of what she saw every morning in her own bathroom mirror—embarrassingly naked bodies that weren’t at all pretty but that had moles and scars and parts that were too fat and parts that were too lean, eyes that were too small and feet that were too large.

And just as she did every morning, the witch did everything she could to keep from looking at the palace, looking down at her feet, up at the sky, and when she thought she was safe enough, closing her eyes.

From a long ways away, Queen Succulent spied the witch and, given the witch’s penchant for running into and tripping over all manner of objects, it was clear to the Queen that the witch was trying everything she could to not look at the palace, but for the life of her, the Queen could not imagine why. When the witch reached the palace gates, Queen Succulent met her outside and welcomed her in, just as she did every traveler. The linked arms that made up the gate parted and ushered in the witch before linking again, and a multitude of voices chorused a welcome. The witch (whose hearing was also poor) did not respond.

From her moment of arrival, the witch cursed Queen Succulent for her palace of people and her welcoming ways. “Don’t you know better than to take in strangers?” barked the witch. “Who knows what a stranger might do?” The Queen was taken aback by

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the witch’s reaction, so new was it to her, and she had only in all her life met friends, never strangers, and so did not recognize the witch as such. So Queen Succulent persisted in showing the witch kindness, in offering a bed for the night, a bowl of warm lentil soup, a glass of strawberry wine. But the witch just shrunk further into herself, pulled her thistle-weed cloak tighter, and glowered at the Queen. Still, when the Queen left, the witch guzzled the strawberry wine, devoured the lentil soup, sprawled in the bed, grumbling under fleecy blankets that all she was given and all she consumed was miserable.

Days went by and the witch was made welcome in the castle. She ate more lentil soup, drank more strawberry wine, slept more nights in the bed she had been given. Queen Succulent watched and wondered over her—never had she seen one so sad, so alone, so in need of touch, companionship, love, yet the witch would have none of it. The witch also watched Queen Succulent, but rather than wonder over the Queen, the witch despised her. Not only was her palace made of people, but people surrounded her all the time, smiling at her, singing to her, touching her in ways that made the witch terribly uncomfortable, made her itch to even think of such contact. Never could she imagine smiling at or singing to others, let alone touching and being touched, and being in the presence of people who wanted to do all three just made her pull her thistle-weed cloak tighter around her so that if any should try and touch her, they would soon regret it. But though the witch could have left at any time, she stayed and watched Queen Succulent with her subjects, and she despised their mutual desire to touch, to love, to protect each other with their own flesh and keep everybody safe from harm.

One day the witch approached Queen Succulent’s throne and demanded that people stop touching, that the palace of flesh be disbanded and that rocks and sharp glass be used for the palace walls instead. “Walls are for keeping people out,” the witch hissed.

But Queen Succulent, puzzled, asked why people should be kept out when walls could grow big enough to let all people in. “No they can’t,” insisted the witch, whose vision was so poor she could not even see how things worked in this particular land, to see that everyday the walls were growing and expanding as more people, even she herself, entered into Queen Succulent’s domain. And though the witch told the Queen that she had powers that could make her regret this decision, the Queen did not change her mind.

Queen Succulent was a good woman, a kind woman, a

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woman who wanted for everybody to know love, even the witch who had shown no reason to deserve it. She had seen how the witch cringed when she and her subjects drew near, had seen how she used her thistle-weed cloak to keep everybody away. She had even seen the witch in her private quarters put her cloak over the mirror before undressing before it. Everything she had seen. In all of this, in every minute she had been with or listened to or watched the witch, she wanted that the witch should be loved, should know love, and though she sensed the risk to herself was great, Queen Succulent knew what she must do.

If there was a mystery to be solved regarding the witch who disclosed nothing about herself than that she had “powers,” it was this: even had the witch so desired, she could not be touched, could not be held or loved or comforted ever, for she carried within her flesh a curse that made everything she touched wither and die. This was the thing Queen Succulent did not know, though even had she known, knowledge of this thing would not likely have stopped her.

One night after the witch had cast her thistle-weed cloak over the mirror in her room, Queen Succulent went, alone, to her. A candle burned on the mantle above the cold fireplace, enough for a little light but no warmth. The Queen shivered a little and in doing so, announced her presence wordlessly. The witch spun around and tried to cover herself from the Queen’s vision while leaving the cloak over the mirror. Exposed. She must either be exposed to the Queen or to herself, and as she knew that exposure to herself was more than she could bear, she covered herself as best she could from the Queen with her arms and hands and left the cloak where it was.

In front of her, Queen Succulent saw what she had seen every night after the witch disrobed before her covered mirror. She saw a body. A woman’s body. A body no more and no less beautiful than any of those in her lands. And then Queen Succulent did what she knew she must despite the witch’s cowering. The Queen embraced the witch, just as she embraced everyone who entered into her lands for whatever reason. But as the Queen’s great love flowed out of her and into the witch, the witch’s flesh curse crept inside the Queen. After the Queen’s embrace, the witch snatched her thistle-weed cloak from the mirror, as much an angry, unloving woman as before, and even though she had been healed of her flesh curse, she still had no desire for touch or for love, still despised Queen Succulent and all her subjects. The only effect the Queen’s embrace had on the witch was to send her fleeing from the palace of

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people, cursing and spitting as she sought shelter in the jungle wilderness.

All in vain. Such was Queen Succulent’s conclusion after the witch went running from the palace, unloved by her own force of will, her own shield of selfishness. This saddened the Queen, but she was still grateful for all the others in her palace and in her lands who did love her and who allowed her to love them in return. Joy came from them, life came from them, love came from them. But Queen Succulent had only a moment to think this before everything and everybody she ever knew began to dry up and die.

One touch. One touch was all it took. One touch of her hand to the shoulder of the child whose body helped make up the doorframe to the witch’s room. One touch and the child sighed, wilted away, shriveled up, skin turning to powder beneath Queen Succulent’s hand. She didn’t know quite what to say or do, but suddenly where her hand had touched flesh, it now touched bone.

The child was gone. And then this thing, whatever it was, spread from the child she had touched to the others making up the doorframe, and then the door, and then the walls of the room, and all throughout the palace until all had been touched, all had died, all had disappeared except for the bones. The palace shuddered, sighed, and sunk in on itself, bones locking around her. Within hours, her palace of people had died, and all their flesh had withered and fallen away. The green forest turned brown, a blazing sun rose, and soon all that remained was destroyed by fire. Grief gripped the Queen and she cried out against this curse that was so undeserved. That her subjects, all her subjects, should die, and by her hand: this was the most bitter truth of all.

All but one, one who had ventured beyond.

Though Queen Succulent had loved all her subjects equally, she had a special fondness for Sestine, a young singer who entertained her with songs and poems and who was away on a tour of the outerlands when the curse took hold. On Sestine’s return to the palace some months following the disintegration of the palace, Sestine saw the Queen through the tangle of bones that now imprisoned her in her palace, and though the singer’s impulse was to break through the tangle of bones and rescue her, the Queen warned, “Come no nearer! I am cursed!”

“What has happened, my great Queen?” cried Sestine who could see not only the destruction of the land and subjects, but also the queen’s great sadness and loneliness.

“I have been cursed,” howled the Queen, so great was her

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despair. “I have been cursed by a witch I gave my love to help.

From now on I shall be Queen Dessicada as everything under my touch withers and dies. See what has become of my palace of people?” she sobbed, motioning with her hands. “They have become a palace of bones.”

The heart of the singer went out to Queen Dessicada, “Please, let me come to you,” Sestine pleaded. “I bring in my pack peaches from the Freestone orchards and water from the fountains of Afar. They, along with thoughts of your great kindness, have sustained me on my long journey, and I know they also will restore you.”

And though the Queen wanted nothing more than to let the singer enter, to let Sestine bring water and fruit and poetry and song, she knew that she could not bear the life that she could not leave if she dried up the one person who was most dear to her.

“Go!” shouted Queen Dessicada, more harshly than she had intended. “Turn and run away from here, away from me. I could not bear to have you die along with all the others. Oh that I too could die! That I could wither away and send my soul elsewhere!

But as I can only cause others and not myself to wither, grant me this one wish. Go out and deliver your water and fruit, your poems and songs to another. Enrich another’s life instead of mine. If I can believe you are beyond where I can see, doing what I can only imagine, then I will have some small measure of joy in this domain of the dry and the dead.”

And so Sestine, the Queen’s beloved singer, went away saddened but knowing it must be done. She delivered fruit and water not to another, but to the desert, singing poems and songs to the air around, the sky above, and the sand beneath. And around Sestine sprung up the most unlikely of plants, plants like giant thistles with unpleasant prickles and spikes that not even the singer could touch. And though this saddened Sestine, still the singer was grateful for their company, no matter that they could not touch.

One day, Sestine was sure, these plants would burst and spill water over the sand, water that would work its way back to Queen Dessicada and her palace of bones. One day, Sestine believed, the Queen would live again, the palace would spring to life, and all would know that the source of their life was the water and fruit, the songs and the poems sung by another in the middle of a desert.

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Christina Yu

A Note for Visitors for Rumit Love-Pancholi

Come this way through the booby trap of garbage bags and hat-sized racoons making love between them.

The avalanche of TV dinners will stop tumbling out of the fridge to let you pass the mirror, the stubble-peppered sink where a whore and a faggot meet after their respective episodes of passion. Try that mouthwash martini on the cork coaster of Greek lovers coupled in a position we tried once.

If you can guess which one of the six cabinets holds the nest of fruit flies, you may kiss the pregnant belly that floats from body to body.

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Rumit Pancholi

Mired for Christina Ting Yu I find you cutting tofu with a chopstick because there are no clean knives left.

What becomes of that eventual sweat, dragging through dark corners of your face as my finger moves slow along the surface of your dusty television screen?

A peeking eye reflects through that sliver, sees that photo on the mantle, turns into that smiling man cupping a trophy.

He looks like his father; so much for taking his lead, you smirk, realize that I am standing there, watching you drop that chopstick into a sink full of water, mired in the cuttings of knifes.

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Lisa De Niscia

Pepper It was unusually warm that Sunday afternoon in late October, and the creek’s cool water felt good on Elizabeth’s bare feet though she wasn’t sure why she bothered to take off her shoes and socks before stepping in. She wasn’t sure why she bothered to fold her socks and place one inside each shoe. Or why she carefully sat her shoes side by side making sure that the ends of the laces were tucked beneath the folded socks. Or why it mattered that she didn’t want her dog, Pepper, to pull the socks out of her shoes. Stay, Pepper, stay like a good boy was what Elizabeth said to her Springer Spaniel, the dog she had loved for half of her life of thirteen years. “Stay,” she said as she took several more steps, the water soaking her pants to right below her knees.

The creek was at most three feet deep and only in some places, but that was deep enough thought Elizabeth as she saw her father, stepmother, and three half sisters in their living room. Elizabeth watched from their front lawn through the picture window, and Elizabeth wondered how long it would be before they noticed she was standing there. She wanted to throw stones at the window, she wanted to wave her arms, but she also didn’t want to disturb them, for it looked like they were having so much fun talking and laughing.

She wanted to rush in and join them, but she couldn’t bring herself to do that either. Instead, she turned around and ran towards the creek, just a short distance from their house. “Don’t follow me,” Elizabeth said to her dog as they both ran. “Go home, Pepper, go home.” But Pepper didn’t go home, and Elizabeth kept running towards the creek.

Elizabeth took a few more steps into the water, and as Pepper splashed behind her she wondered what it would’ve been like if it was her mother in the living room, and Elizabeth wondered, as she had wondered most of her life, why her mother had to leave when Elizabeth was only two years old, why her mother had to move so far away, why across the country to Albuquerque. Elizabeth turned around and grabbed her dog, carried him out of the water. “Stay,” she said as she set him down a few feet from the water’s edge.

Pepper shook furiously, and Elizabeth tasted the cool water droplets.

She wiped her face with her forearm and walked back into the creek, but no sooner had she taken two steps before Pepper followed. And once again Elizabeth carried her dog out of the water and plopped him down near a tree. This time she didn’t say

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anything to him before heading back into the creek. And this time, like the last time, Pepper followed his mistress.

Elizabeth tried to ignore Pepper as she waded down the creek, walking as if in slow motion, but she glanced at him swimming beside her, and she wondered if the water was too cold for him. She wondered if his paws were cold. She wondered how long he could paddle like that. She suddenly stopped and watched Pepper paddle onward until he turned around and looked at Elizabeth.

“You can’t keep following me in here,” Elizabeth said, and she couldn’t continue to watch Pepper paddle madly, so she walked out of the creek.

Elizabeth sat on the ground next to her shoes. She unfolded her socks and tugged them onto her wet feet, and she didn’t like the way her wet feet felt in her dry cotton socks. As she reached out to grab a shoe, Pepper took the left one. Elizabeth hurriedly put on her right shoe and hopped on one foot chasing after him. He suddenly lost interest and flopped down, panting. Elizabeth crinkled her nose as her hand grasped the slimy shoe. She attempted to wipe saliva off with a brown leaf but that only made her shoe dirty as the crisp leaf disintegrated into little brown bits. I’ll be sure to remember to take my shoes off before I go inside was what Elizabeth thought, but when she got home she forgot about her shoes as Charlotte, her stepmother, greeted her at the door.

“What happened?” Charlotte said when Elizabeth, noticeably wet, stepped into the foyer.

“Pepper ran into the creek and wouldn’t come out,” Elizabeth said as the rest of her family gathered around her in the living room.

“I had to go in after him.”

“Was the water warm or cold?” Elizabeth’s sister, Joyce, said.

“That water must be full of germs,” her other sister, Virginia, said.

“You better change or you might get sick,” said the third sister, Carol.

“That dog needs to go to obedience school,” Elizabeth’s father said.

“No, no, no,” Elizabeth said hugging Pepper. “He’s a very good dog.” Then she let go of Pepper and said, “Watch.” Elizabeth took off her left shoe and threw it across the living room.

“Fetch, Pepper, fetch.”

And Pepper did.

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Alan Lindsay

Merrimack, N.H. What, when I return, as I did today, to the place where I was raised, am I— knowing that I will never find it— looking for?

And why, as I drive the old streets, marking all that has changed, holding out for something recognizable, why am I reporting all I see and all I miss to you, invisible beside me?

Nosing among new-named streets, blank buildings whose histories confront me with aimless urgency old spots among the smear of the new: the McDonalds where I used to work, the house of the old friend’s parents with his name still on the mailbox, the spot where Sandy, on the day before we all left for college, knowing she was the one in the world I most wanted to love leaned in at my window and made an offering of goodbye, and the place I last saw Kathy before she died.

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I know that here is where the text of whatever it is I go back to read must be read. But I don’t know why, before I set my eyes on how little of all I remember remains, before I gave over the questions again, I was already writing these words, to you.

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No Private Language The sender of the shopping list is not the same as the receiver, even if they bear the same name....

Jacques Derrida My lists of essential things achingly composed, my dashed off notes, of what I might forget to do in time, are all for someone I can never know, can never meet however long I pace row on row the parking lot, pressing and pressing the panic button, scanning desperately the silence—something like my dad I guess who left before I knew my name and did not report in until the day I heard he’d leaped and missed a moving train.

It’s how it is: a shame.

Someone who does not exist is not calling your name.

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James Matthew Wilson

Acedia At the Civil War Memorial. City Cemetery, South Bend, Indiana.

Some numinous thing I’d like to say, but guilt Before oracular high-flung sentiments Requires that what’s been said is also meant, And so my eyes cleave to the moldering silt.

Some miseries I’d like to offer witness, But that is not my blood-churned scalp, and not My shrapnel tiling the dust, and not My father’s gravestone unchiseled and unpolished.

The broken eaves of the green mansion bend Beneath the weight of snow and limbs, the crescent Of sky above its chimneys opalescent With dry light, where all speech comes to an end.

But who were these? These wraiths of singing bone Who knew Heaven’s guilt and left me here alone?

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James Matthew Wilson

Balloon Man You know the sound balloon strings make when they been cut; Tied to split knuckles, how they limply dangle there.

If Mac comes in and groans again and rubs his gut, I’ll say, “At least you got a job. The kids just stare At me, and then up at the red, the rubbery green.”

He knows the economics, so that’s all I’ll say: Ten-thirty a.m. I give up and cut each string, Then go to take a stool at Chuck’s. If kids won’t pay, Then I don’t gotta stand, a clown at the grocery Until the sun has made my glasses steam and glare, And I wish I could type or something. Who wants to be A broken vendor day in, day out? Rotting there, The stench of vulcan in your nose, the cheap twine cutting Into your right hand’s gritty reddening knuckles. The left An only, last and loyal pal, its fingers clutching The groaning flip-blade in its plastic-handled heft To cut those unsold helium balls -- the useless things.

But Mac doesn’t hardly sigh or swear at me no more, Or ask, after I quit my work, if I will bring A few bucks home from Chuck’s. He knows that he has scored Points on an old wound in the ribs that hurt like lime Sizzling on my finger-cuts. I bow my head When he gets home from work and wipe the tar and grime That grocery parking lot have smeared on it. I’m dead, Those little pimply brats say, when they come and gape At me and the bright swelling sores of my balloons.

On a good day some brat with his allowance apes Me, buys a green and blue, and I am flush by noon.

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I don’t care how they go, though it helps to sell, I guess.

I’m neither lame nor small, I cannot sing a song, But with a low and hungry swipe at her pink dress My free left hand sends little Isabelle along, Since she just like her mother speaks too much. The rest Stare from the corner of their eyes on the far curb.

Unless I start to scratch my sweating pits or chest, Then they look wide and whisper something. I disturb Grown women, but the brats come with their popsicles As if I were a hobo clown fired from the circus, To see if I’ll bend down to take a few flung nickels.

Of course I will, the fucking kids. The things that hurt us Most aren’t the hard humiliations of a job, Or knowing I’ll never screw their mothers in their Festivas’ Back seat, but wondering if some other drooling slob Has beat me to my stool and is shooting my tequilas.

Mac knows that kind of man, though he will never be one.

He’s got a girl, an Olds, in poker always two-pair, While I take what I can, like a dog in mating season, Or a balloon man in the spring happier than you are.

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Chris Gerben

after the movie It came as a revelation a relief to finally realize to finally define it as a stillness that overcame me that overcomes me each time for hours after the varying fact But it’s a redefinition a redefining this stillness that I want to be poignant such as noting— or using— an antiquated urinal in some elongated restroom full of couches that there are pedals near the ground and now signs eye level that read under clear tape: “push pedal to flush” to explain which makes so much sense to chuckle why’d we change? or can we change back? should we, but, that is not stillness It is

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walking from the theatre down a darkening series of streets on Saturday—Washington and Division and Huron and Ann usually so loud tonight even here there is stillness buses glide and a fire engine rolling with lights twirling overhead and police cars close behind even here there is stillness But this isn’t about just sound or images or moments in crowded space when I’m alone and walking back home when I don’t want to talk and I know why and I don’t know why tonight like many nights I dial your number and look both ways crossing Huron and at the digital screen— your number— looking, holding with my ungloved hand so cold I think of immersion and ice water I think of Shackleton and what it means to be a man

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and what it means to love a man to you to home I’m getting closer again I close my phone and the memory of intention is erased for now I run up steps repeating in my head as I have the entire walk between there and here It is a revelation a relief this definition this redefinition this awful stillness at last

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David Ewald

Can’t Keep the Spider So we’re watching Arachnophobia on video—just my parents, my sister and me—in our darkened living room when something happened strange enough to distract me from the screen. My father, see, he was sitting on the couch with us when the movie started, but after a few minutes, as soon as the credits were through rolling and the guys were roaming the jungle searching for the nastiest ugliest most deadly spiders, and my father knew these spiders were going to come out soon, he did something strange. Or some things strange, I should say. First he drew his legs up so that his knees were against his chest. Then he ducked his head down between his knees several times. He looked like a little kid that had lost a coin in his crotch. I ended up watching him instead. He was sitting right next to me and I just had to smile at his antics. Halfway through the movie my father took to the carpet and laid there curled up. I saw him close his eyes at the part where the spiders drop from the ceiling of the house they’re invading. And in the end, when the biggest spider of them all shows itself, my father actually yelped.

When the movie was over and the credits were rolling, he got up from the carpet and stretched.

“That was good,” he said.

“You were scared,” Mom said.

“Daddy, you closed your eyes,” my sister added.

He denied these accusations and promptly went to bed before they could say anything else that might embarrass him.

I thought he’d been scared too. I’d never seen him scared before. I was only twelve at the time and still had a ways to go.

Just to make certain of my father’s fear, I asked Mom before going to bed that night, “Dad’s really scared of spiders?”

“Oh yes,” she replied.

“What kind of spiders?”

“Oh, all kinds, I think.”

“Even daddy long-legs?”

“Probably even those.”

“Daddy long-legs are some of the most lethal spiders in existence, but they don’t have big enough mouths to bite us. I read that somewhere.”

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“What a memory you have.” And then she kissed me on the forehead. Her answers had somehow given me confidence.

So knowing that my father had this weakness—that he was scared of something—really fascinated me. And spiders. I could take advantage of the fact that he was scared of spiders. They weren’t intangible the way ghosts were, or radiation from the microwave.

I went outside one day after school, around the side of the house, walking close to the wall, until I came to the air conditioning unit. Behind the unit was a thick electrical cord that snaked in through a hole in the wall of the house. This hole was the lair of a black widow spider I’d been observing for some time already.

The spider wasn’t around this afternoon, nothing in its web.

I decided to change that. I walked across the gravel and through the small square patch of lawn in the center of our yard, past the waterplant covered ridge and into no-man’s land. I called this area of the yard no-man’s land because (a) I was interested in World War I (or any war for that matter), and (b) the place looked like a wasteland, dry and barren with rocks dust-caked and strewn everywhere. I saw cracks in the ground. Fissures, I thought. You could fall into them at the slightest tremor. Swallow you whole, down you go.

I found a stick nearby, picked it up and carried it over to the nearest anthill. Red ants moved about sluggishly. That would have to change. I stuck the stick deep into the ants’ home and they went instantly wild, incensed. I let go of the stick, which was still stuck in the hole, and stepped back as the ants rushed my feet, seeking out the enemy who’d attacked from above. They were nearing my shoes; I had to act quickly. Already a couple of reds were on the stick. I grabbed the stick and ran out of no-man’s land, down the ridge and across the lawn and gravel, back to the air conditioning unit on the side of the house. As I ran I watched the ants to see how far they’d come down the stick. I watched how close they were to my hand. I was smart. When they came down the stick, almost to the end I held, I grabbed the top end with my other hand and flipped the stick and the ants over. I did this three or four times before I reached the air conditioning unit, so the ants never got to my hands.

I came up close to the spider’s web and touched the stick to it. The ants ran down the stick and onto the web. They wriggled there but couldn’t get free. I smiled, watching them trying to free themselves when it was obviously so hopeless. I poked the two ants with the stick; they tried grabbing on to it but they were already too stuck in the web to save themselves.

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The motion the ants were making would signal the black widow sooner or later. I just wanted it to be sooner instead of later.

So I helped the spider out by moving its web around with the stick.

The web shook but didn’t break; it was much too strong to fall to pieces that easily. I didn’t want to break the web anyway—no, I wanted that widow to come out and feast. But the thing is it didn’t come out. I must have sat there by the side of the house, gravel digging into my knees, looking at that messy web for about half an hour before giving up and going inside. I figured the spider didn’t eat until night and besides, I had better things to do.

I went into the living room and played Nintendo. That kept my mind off the spider for a while, but still I wanted to see it that day, before night. I wanted to capture it, not just watch it. I had to have it.

I grew impatient as I played. The video game wasn’t doing anything for me. I decided to go back outside and see if the widow had come out of her lair yet, and sure enough, one of the ants was missing from the web. I felt good. That meant the spider had come out and devoured one of them. I was sure it would come out again soon, and I wouldn’t have to wait long and feel such strong impatience.

I picked up the stick from off the top of the air conditioning unit. Then I tapped the web again with the stick, and this time the black widow came out. It moved so quickly that I just had to take a step back, because I’d read these stories from people who swore that black widow spiders are excellent jumpers. This one lady said she’d been rummaging around among some boxes in her garage when she came across this widow in one of those boxes. The widow just sat there, watching her I suppose. She thought it was dead. But as she leaned in close, it suddenly leaped at her! She screamed and fell back, fearing for her life, and lucky for her the spider landed on her blouse so she was able to beat it off with a shoe before it could touch her skin.

That’s what I read anyway.

I didn’t know if this particular black widow was in a jumping mood or not, but I wasn’t going to find out. I knew that if a black widow did bite me, I probably wouldn’t die. I’d get awfully sick, though. Widows are really able to kill only old people, unhealthy people and babies—that’s why I’d never let my grandmother into the garage if she wanted to go in there for something. I’d always do it myself. She’d look at me with this strange, scrunched-up face, but I didn’t mind that look. I only

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thought, I’m saving your life, Grandma, and tried to transmit that sentence to her through my powers of psychic communication, the same as the radiation rays from the microwave. I was the microwave then. Or trying to be, anyway.

Garages used to scare me because of the black widows, but by the time I was twelve I’d overcome my fear. My father, at the age of forty, still hadn’t overcome his.

The black widow I was dealing with now hadn’t jumped; I could breathe easier. Surprisingly this one was ignoring the second ant. Maybe it was full. That didn’t matter, really, because the spider wasn’t going to be out here much longer. I ran back inside the house and grabbed a Tupperware bowl from out of an overhanging cabinet. Then I went back to the web and waited. The black widow just sat there in its web, not moving. Maybe it was getting ready to jump. I braced myself.

“Are you playing with the spider again?”

I groaned. My sister really annoyed me then.

“No duh,” I said. “Here, help me catch it.”

She stood by my side. “With what?”

“With your hands, stupid.”

“I’m not stupid.”

“Yeah you are. You’re just too stupid to know you’re stupid.”

“That’s mean. I want to play your Nintendo.”

“You want to what?”

“I want to play your Nintendo.”

“You...want to play...Super Mario Brothers 3?”

“Yeah. Why not? Come on. You’re not playing it now.”

“I am too playing it now. I’m just taking a little break, that’s all.“ This was a new development, my sister wanting to play my video games—any video games, really. She had never asked to play Nintendo before. Had she suddenly gotten smart or something? I would have to watch this development closely. ”Maybe later,” I said. “After I’m done with my game, maybe. Or tonight.”

“Okay. But you know you’re gonna have to let me.”

“Don’t you want to help me show this black widow to Dad?” “No way. He’ll kill you.”

Maybe he would kill me. I hadn’t thought of that.

“Fine,” I said. “Go watch the microwave for now.”

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“Dumb-ass.” She punched me on the arm. It didn’t hurt.

Kristin left. I stood there holding the Tupperware, thinking of all the ways my father could kill me. He could drown me in a toilet, or stick me in the bathtub and then throw a plugged-in toaster into the water. That happened in a James Bond movie I watched with him once.

There were all sorts of options available to him, but none of them seemed like interesting ways to die. I’d have to think harder.

And I’d have to think later. Right now I needed to get the black widow into the bowl, without my sister’s help since she was being such a wenis.

Then I really thought hard and decided I’d need two bowls for this job. So I went back inside and came out with a glass dish about the same size and diameter as the Tupperware bowl. The black widow was crawling for its lair. I’d have to act fast. I held the Tupperware bowl upside-down above the web. I held the dish just below the widow and its web. Then, with a quick slam, I put the two together and there—there! The black widow was mine, caught in between the dish and the bowl. That pleased me.

Lucky for me, I could see through the dish up at the spider.

It was struggling, bouncing around, having quite a tough time trying to break through the barriers. No use, of course. You can’t bust out of Tupperware—not if you’re a spider anyway.

I ran back into the house, anxious to get things going. My father wouldn’t be home until later that night. I looked at the time on the microwave. 4:42. I had about three hours to annihilate.

I played Nintendo. But this time I played a different game, which I didn’t last long at. So I turned on the TV and watched a good portion of the basketball game. That’s how I spent most of those three hours. Before I really got comfortable out there in the living room I put the black widow container on top of the refrigerator. I didn’t keep it with me in the living room because I thought the TV might have an adverse effect on the spider. Maybe the flashing images and glow would make it go wild, or sedate it.

Either way I couldn’t have that with my father coming home. The top of the refrigerator was the safest place, far out of range of the microwave, which would give off its radiation rays and probably cause the spider to mutate into something monstrous. I couldn’t wait.

Every fifteen minutes or so I’d check on my spider just to make sure it hadn’t died on me, or knocked the Tupperware bowl over and gotten out. Whenever I checked, the widow quieted down

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and sat still. It was really a very good little pet. I wondered if it was watching me. I thought that would be cool, but I’d heard that widows couldn’t really see in daylight. That would make the night so much better.

Mom came home a little before seven. As usual she was tired and immediately started rummaging around in the cabinets, looking for something to eat. She would cook dinner later, but for the moment she needed snack foods that were never there because my sister and I always ate them.

She came into the living room where I was just finishing up the basketball game.

“Where’s the Triscuits?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You haven’t seen them around, have you?”

“No.” “Does your sister have them?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is she?”

“Her room.”

Instead of going to my sister’s room, Mom returned to the kitchen. I heard her open the refrigerator. That’s when I jumped up from the couch and ran to warn her.

“Mom!” She was bent over, just picking out a few TV dinners to microwave. She turned to me. I pointed at the top of the refrigerator. She looked up but didn’t seem all that surprised by what she saw. “Oh,” she said, and set the dinners on the counter.

“Did you find that in here?” I shook my head.

“Out there?”

I nodded.

She didn’t seem concerned that there was a potentially lethal spider sitting trapped on top of the refrigerator. She didn’t show concern that the only thing separating her from possible death was plastic. I was surprised by Mom’s calm demeanor and, also, a little scared of how she wasn’t reacting, like she’d been turned into a zombie-mom by the radiation rays from the microwave. Maybe she’d gone into shock from seeing the spider. That would be something to tell Brad when I saw him at school.

“We can’t have that in here,” she said without looking at me.

Uh-oh, I thought. I wouldn’t be showing the black widow to my father tonight. I waited for Mom to continue, but she didn’t say

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another word and instead concentrated on fixing our dinners. She looked the boxes over as if she were inspecting something more important than food. That meant our conversation was over. She hadn’t exactly given me an order, so I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with the spider. Nintendo called. I went into the living room.

Mom took a few minutes before coming out and giving me the order for spider removal.

“Get rid of it, Kevin.”

“How?” I held back from pushing start on the controller. I didn’t really want to play this game; I’d beaten it before.

“It’s your responsibility. Black widow spiders are dangerous.”

“I know, Mom. How?” “Oh take it out front, I don’t care. Just get it out of the house before your father sees it and has a coronary.”

I turned off the system and went back to the kitchen, where I took the spider’s cage down with both hands. “Oh....okay,” I said, trying to make it seem as if she’d really hurt me by not letting me keep the black widow in the house. Mom didn’t notice my attempts to gain her sympathy.

Not surprisingly, I’d lost focus by this point. Why had I brought the spider inside? To show my father, sure. But there was more to it than that. I wanted to scare him, just because I’d never scared him before and now, for the first time ever, I knew of something that truly frightened him.

I’d even thought briefly of putting this arachnid under his pillow. Maybe it would lay its eggs there. Maybe it would bite him.

I’ll never know because I took it outside to where the rose bushes were in front.

The porch light illuminated the way. Almost as soon as I stepped outside, I heard a low rumble, a car, and looked up to see my father pull into the driveway. The headlights lit me up. The spider must have freaked because I could feel skittish movement from within the cage, and for a moment I also felt fear. That left me, though, because I realized my position: here I was holding this Tupperware bowl and this plate together, and my father had just gotten out of his car. My chance, right here.

He approached me. “What d’ya got there, Kev?” “A spider,” I said in a low voice.

“What?” He leaned in closer.

“A spider,” I repeated, and then, loudly: “A black widow

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spider.” I held up the cage so that it was directly in front of his face.

My father’s eyes widened. He sucked in air quickly, sounding like a whistle.

Then my father ran inside the house. I stood there smiling, and less than a minute later the front door burst open and my father stepped outside, a can of insect spray in each hand. He came toward me, slowly. I didn’t dare move.

“Set it down, son. And step away from it.”

I obeyed. He rushed forward and kicked the Tupperware bowl off and away. We both stood there, close beside each other, looking down at this black widow spider that wasn’t moving at all. “I killed it,” I said.

“Let’s make sure,” he said, and shook both cans.

The spider moved. My father screamed and started back toward the front door. “Don’t go near it!” he warned.

My spider crawled away from the dish, toward the rose bushes. I let it go. I looked for my father, but he’d already gone inside.

Dinner was even more tense than usual that night. After he’d finished eating, my father got up from the table and rummaged around underneath the kitchen sink. He brought out four cans of insect spray and walked over to where I was still eating my dinner.

He tapped me on the shoulder and motioned for me to follow him.

We headed for the door.

“Where we going, Dad?” “Spider hunting,” he answered.

We went almost every night after that, until the novelty of it wore off and we returned to the way things have always been between us. But I will always remember those nights. On those nights he insisted that I go with him all over the place—around the sides of our house, into the garage and then around the fence in the backyard. Searching. Black widows only come out at night, you see.

That’s what he said. I wasn’t entirely sure about that. We did find widows most nights, and with my father it was always the spray.

One time Mom tried talking him into using a different technique: “Why don’t you use a shoe, or a broom, like I do?” But he’d just shake his cans and go about his business, a true professional.

Those nights usually lasted late. Once, it was nearing midnight and he still hadn’t found a black widow to satisfy his urge.

They’d probably all moved to the hills by then.

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He was still as obsessed as ever when I entered high school, only then I refused when he asked me to go hunting with him. By that time, I had better things to do.

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Danna Ephland

Notes for Needle take a number, take a seat, sit on your hands, take a deep breath, let it go like a long-haired man traveling west to water and work, your chair scraped to the heaping desk no roll or swivel, tight over paper, you scribble nonsense & orders: take this, take that. pack it all in a bag canvas strap pulled across a yellow summer shirt your twenty reasons blackbirds down the page, or a blue heron landing across the creek, leaving discernible marks: your life span, the rent, a head count of friends assembled on the porch last night, what time the sun set, how long the man will be gone, how far the west coast is from here as if you haven’t counted a thousand times since leaving take a magazine, take your pulse, take a fall, a dive, take a sip, a drink, sink, scratch, pull out your hands

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Needle and the Ditch Needle stares at what’s left of a deer in an early November ditch.

Curl of ribs, limp chain of vertebrae, skull nearly whole with no eye, broken legs in a pile and one hoof.

Needle knows these bones.

Pick up a piece, the bones suggest. Needle’s palms itch, but she hesitates. Not sure she belongs in these woods.

Like a car wreck, repulsed and relieved, Needle is drawn, can’t move on.

Needle squats in dead grasses bursting with seed. The bones stare back. Touch us.

Take us home.

Collecting the bones in her shirt, Needle pulls its tail up to hold them.

They enter her body. Death as close as this ditch to the road.

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Needle Moves In With Louie on Roosevelt Road, just down the street from Fitzgerald’s Blues Bar. Actually Louie’s moved out. Needle hasn’t seen him since the closing.

Polite man, a little jumpy, signing over the two bedroom bungalow.

When the walls speak, Needle turns up the music, she doesn’t want to hear an old song, the one they played last night at the blues bar when Needle ducked in the ladies’ room on purpose to miss it, didn’t want to spoil the party for buying her first house. Her friends didn’t understand her awkward exit. Needle wonders if they listen to lyrics while she is gone. She sits in the stall longer than she needs to. Needle’s hearing is good, she regrets. It always has been.

The walls speak. She can hear them in the new house. Needle cleans away more than dirt. Louie’s temper is all over the place, deep in rugs she lets professionals clean. Needle wipes marks, unscrews hardware from door frames, pulls down thick curtains, throws windows open to air, runs water until it’s cold. It was Louie.

Out front Louie introduced Needle to his Camaro, called it his girlfriend.

Louie smirked toward the house where a woman sat in the corner staring at a newborn. He called her the wife.

Needle scrubs while Louie looks on.

She doesn’t want him here, didn’t ask for this. Surrounded by chain link fences and brick bungalow walls, tidy yards with lawn ornaments, with flags, Needle heaves grass seed where Louie’s dogs paced it all away.

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Corey Madsen

Snow In Darkness Will Fall They were just ten miles out of Elk Rapids, easing through a desolate strip of snow-covered state forestland, when Chase said, “Dad, the road’s gone.”

Gerald was hunched over the dash, searching the light of his headlights for the tire tracks he’d been following, but from the front of his truck on it looked like the ocean floor.

“I can still see the ditch,” he said. “And no more comments like that. Not while I’m trying to concentrate on the road.”

He turned the knobs of his truck radio until the static receded around a single distinguishable voice, and then cranked up the heater. He held his hand to one of the vents until the air coming out felt hot enough to evaporate the fog on his windshield.

“Great. Five more inches by morning. I’ll be plowing this guy’s driveway all night.”

As they coasted through an unblemished intersection, Gerald gave the steering wheel a few lazy pulls back and forth, leaving two snakelike imprints behind him in the soft red glow of his taillights.

“What are you doing?” Chase asked.

“Just goofing around.” He straightened the wheel and flicked on his high beams, but all this did was illuminate the falling snow. “My God, this is the worst I’ve ever seen it.”

“How much further is it?”

“I don’t know,” Gerald said, this time trying his wipers. “A few more miles, maybe.”

He glanced at Chase to make sure he wasn’t smearing the condensation on the windows again, and found the boy sitting still with his hands in his lap, watching intently as snow came racing at the windshield like a vicious swarm of moths. He was dressed in his brother’s old hand-me-downs: a red knit winter’s cap with enough snags in the threading to make his father self-conscious whenever he wore it out in public, a pair of cheap Thinsulate gloves worn through at the fingers, black snow-pants that made a swish-swishswish sound whenever he walked, and a perfectly good down winter coat that both he and his brother had ruined by wiping their runny noses on the cuffs. Looking at the boy now, with his hair sticking out the bottom of the cap, Gerald wondered when the last time was his mother had given him a haircut.

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“Why don’t we play a game?” Gerald asked. “You pick.”

Chase tucked his chin inside his jacket, which once would have made Gerald weak with affection, but now seemed like a habit a nine-year-old should have outgrown.

“I don’t know any games,” Chase said.

“Of course you do. Stop doing that with your chin.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be watching the road?”

Gerald turned up the radio so that it would be difficult to talk over and tried to zero in on a Rolling Stones’ song that couldn’t fight off the static. When a set of headlights appeared in the distance ahead of him, he tapped the brakes and returned both hands to the wheel, leaving the song to be swallowed in the hiss of competing frequencies. This could be a drunk driver heading home from one of the roadside taverns out this way. The longer it took for the vehicle to draw nearer, the more certain he became of this.

“Are you buckled up, Chase?”

“Yes.” The vehicle soon passed, but just before the shape of its headlights revealed to Gerald the shape of a full-sized van, the driver flashed his high beams. In what almost felt like return fire, Gerald flashed his back.

“Fucking prick.”

Since he now had bits of coloration floating through his vision, he rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, knowing this was useless but liking the odd sense of relief it brought him anyway.

“Why do you have to plow out Mr. Lipscomb’s driveway all the time? I thought Mom said he was the one who’s always out shoveling.”

“He pays me. Besides, do you know what would happen if I didn’t plow him out? They’d probably find him dead at the end of his driveway.” He stopped rubbing his eyes. They were beginning to adjust to the indiscriminate blackness that was a Michigan highway at night. “The man just doesn’t know any better.”

“Why doesn’t he just live in Chestnut Ridge with grandma and grandpa? Then he’d always have someone to do it for him.”

“He already has someone to do it for him.”

Chase sat quiet for a moment, but it was clear from the look on his face that he had something else to ask.

“What?” Gerald said.

“Why do we have to plow out his driveway so late?”

“When the hell else am I supposed to do it?” He reached over and zipped Chase’s jacket all the way up, since his scarf was

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falling out. “Remember what I said about asking so many questions?”

Within five minutes, they pulled into a long driveway that led uphill to a two-story house with smoke pluming from a stone chimney. Even before he hit the gas Gerald knew that a vehicle had not been up this way since the last few snowfalls. The accumulation of snow was so thick he could barely tell where the side of the driveway stopped and woods began.

As he steered his truck through each snowdrift he could hear a gentle scraping against the undercarriage and the low whine of engine belts getting wet. More than once his view of the driveway dimmed as a fresh blast of snow smudged out his headlights, but accelerating caused just enough wind and vibration to clear it away.

He wondered if he shouldn’t have just dropped the plow from the moment he’d made his turn.

“This could take me all night,” he said. Chase looked over at him and seemed unable to decide whether or not it was worth his time to complain.

Gerald parked his truck in front of the man’s garage and thought twice about shutting off the engine. It had to be less than ten degrees outside, and the first thing he noticed looking out of the windshield was the row of gigantic icicles hanging from the eaves like knives. The front windows let out a dismal yellow glow, illuminating deep footprints that led, in different directions, from the garage toward two separate doors. Once again he was left puzzling over which was the one most preferred by its tenant.

“C’mon, Chase. Let’s go see if anyone’s home.”

He got out of the truck and took the leftward path, since the snow had been somewhat packed down. It led to a side door beneath a part of the overhang that was bearing the weight of a large broken pine branch. They tried their best to plant their feet directly inside the boot prints, but snow had filled them. He immediately regretted not having left his truck running—they could’ve used some headlights. The wooden siding, half-stripped of its white paint from the weather, made for a brittle hand rail, and the surrounding woods gave him the strange feeling that if he were to let Chase wander off for only a second, something would jump out and grab him.

“Here,” he said, reaching behind him. “Hold my hand.”

Eventually they came to a small concrete stoop that had been recently shoveled, though some snow had since drifted on each step. While the storm door was closed, the inside door remained

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ajar, spilling light across the cleared concrete.

“I’ve got snow in my boot,” Chase said.

“Hush up.”

Gerald went up the steps and stomped his boots on the welcome mat, which only made snow cave in on his feet. He rapped hard on the inside door.

“Mr. Lipscomb? It’s Gerald Buckley, come to plow out your driveway.”

He let himself in, since the old man—a retired sheet metal worker—had a habit of leaving his hearing aids sitting on the table.

Shivering, Chase nudged past his father and let his face redden in the warmth of the interior.

“Goddamn it, Chase,” Gerald said, grabbing him by the back of the coat. “You’re tracking snow into his house.”

They removed their winter caps, unzipped their coats, and took off their boots, and when they were done, they followed a series of overlapping rugs and tasseled runners into a dim room that Gerald had always considered the living room, though two other rooms in the house could have just as easily qualified. Chase, who was already lagging behind, seemed wholly incapable of matching up the spaciousness of the house—the cathedral ceilings, the sprawling hardwood floors, the kiln-dried pillars of pine—with his father’s descriptions of its inhabitant.

“Where did Mr. Lipscomb get all of this money?” he asked, his snow-pants making that velvety swishing sound.

“Let’s try to be polite.”

When they came into the living room, Mr. Lipscomb was sitting in a leather recliner with a blanket thrown over his legs, as if someone had arranged him that way. Every time Gerald intruded upon him, the man gave the impression of having done nothing for hours but stare off into space. He was thankful to find him fully dressed this time—in what seemed like the uniform of the Northern Michigan retiree, a button-down navy blue shirt and gray slacks— and not in his long johns.

“I hope you don’t mind us letting ourselves in,” Gerald said.

The old man made a slight movement with his arm, a weak attempt at an affirming wave. It was gestures like this that convinced Gerald that one slip on the ice would’ve left this man scattered in bits on the ground. He was the kind of person who would receive mention in the local paper on every birthday and be grandmaster of every local parade until the day he died.

“Who’s this handsome devil you’ve brought with you?” Mr.

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Lipscomb asked. His voice had always surprised Gerald. It sounded as steady and as youthful as the voice of someone Gerald’s age.

“This is my son, Chase,” Gerald said, and added as an afterthought: “He wants to build airplanes when he gets older.”

He had no idea why he said this, but it instantly struck him as something the old man would appreciate. He could feel Chase bristling beside him, but there was nothing he could do about it now. He would apologize later.

“How about that,” Mr. Lipscomb said. “Airplanes.”

“I need to go to the bathroom,” Chase said.

“You just went before we left.”

“You know,” Mr. Lipscomb said, “I have quite a few model airplanes upstairs.”

“Dad,” Chase said.

“Listen, Chase. He builds model airplanes, too.”

“When you don’t have anyone around anymore, you have time to build just about anything.”

In his mind, Gerald was sorting through the ways to bring up the subject of payment without seeming impolite or uninterested in the man’s sad little hobbies. But he felt dangerously close to having to sit through hours of detail about each carefully crafted piece of junk Mr. Lipscomb kept suspended from the ceiling of an upstairs room with fishing line. Gerald had a lot of plowing to do, and the longer he stayed inside this house, the longer it would be before he could drive home and climb into bed.

While Mr. Lipscomb continued talking and went to grab something from the bookshelf, Gerald had to slap Chase’s hand away from his jacket. He was still pleading about going to the bathroom.

“Stop it,” he said, and then spoke in a louder voice to the old man: “I think we’d better get going on that driveway. It’s getting late and if that snow doesn’t stop soon, I’ll have one hell of a time making it home.”

“What’s that?” The old man turned around.

“I said I might get stuck here if I don’t get plowing.”

“Well, if you need to,” Mr. Lipscomb said, “there’s a guest room upstairs.”

Chase was pulling at his jacket again.

“We’re not staying here, are we?”

“No,” Gerald said, watching, with a great deal of pity, as the man continued his conversation without them. “Go get your boots

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on.”

“I think Mr. Lipscomb’s showing me Navy fighter jets or something,” the boy said.

“Don’t argue with me.”

While Chase ran down the hallway to get his boots, Gerald approached the old man, who scanned the shelves talking about an old blue-colored manual being there somewhere. It occurred to Gerald that it might be devastating for an elderly man who lives alone to find that the attentive half of his audience had simply stopped listening and left the room. There was a whiff of desperation even in the care he took sorting through his old books.

“Where’s that little beagle of yours?” Gerald asked, and then he remembered to speak louder. “I’m surprised I haven’t seen him running around.”

The old man turned around, to Gerald’s relief, having forgotten who he had been talking to and just what had brought him over to the bookshelf in the first place.

“Randall?” he said. It took a moment for Gerald to realize this was the name of the dog. “I’m sorry to tell you, Mr. Buckley.

Randall is not with us any longer.”

“Oh,” Gerald said. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that.” He paused for a moment, but the silence was just as difficult to endure.

There was no moving on to other subjects; he would have to repair the damage. “Our neighbors, they just lost a dog. Great big German shepherd. Went running out into the road one day and got clipped by a delivery van. Seems like everyone’s losing pets these days.”

He looked at the floor and tried to look as if he were keeping the memories of some childhood tragedy at bay. But the sad, the disgusting part of it was, he’d made it all up.

“I wanted to get another dog,” Mr. Lipscomb said.

“Mr. Lipscomb,” Gerald said. “Sir…” But he couldn’t, for the life of him, figure out how to bring up money now.

An almost breathable silence stretched between them. It occurred to Gerald that the right thing to do in this situation was to embrace Mr. Lipscomb in some way—to put a firm hand on his shoulder or to give him a kind of awkward, desperate pat on the back, the kind he’d feel obliged to give his father. So Chase’s voice calling from the entryway was almost like an act of mercy.

“My son’s calling me.” He looked away from the man and shouted: “Be right there.”

Mr. Lipscomb was looking around the room, as if trying to

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find a thread of conversation that had simply floated away from him.

“I think my son really wants to get plowing that driveway.”

“Sure,” the man said. “Lot of snow.”

“Did you want to pay me now or should I come back in after I’m done?” He hated giving the man the option like this, but there seemed no way out of it.

“Oh,” the old man said, patting his breast pockets. “Just give me a moment or two to locate my wallet.”

Oh, for Christ’s sake, Gerald thought.

“Dad…” Chase called from down the hallway.

“In a minute, Chase!”

He watched the man snail around the room, lifting up the corners of magazines and old newspapers, sliding his puckered hands in between couch cushions, sorting through blankets. The blankets—how many blankets did this man have? They were everywhere: draped over the top of the sagging brown couch cushions, hanging from the arms of chairs, wadded up on the dusty tops of end tables. It was as if the man were trying to shield himself from some terrible, unstoppable presence with layers of cotton and wool.

“Mr. Lipscomb, sir. Do you need any help?”

The old man glanced up from a long oak end table, where he had been wading through gutted mail and advertisers, an overflow of things that he had probably meant to sort through at one time but forgot.

“It just takes me a while to remember where I put things.”

Gerald watched the man for a few more moments and then walked out of the room.

“Change of plans,” he said to Chase. “Take off your boots.”

Chase, having just finished tying his laces, let his arms go limp.

“Why?” “You’re going to stay inside with Mr. Lipscomb and help him find his wallet.”

“But you said you’d let me drop the plow.”

There were times like this when his son was absolutely right, and the responsible thing to do was admit he’d forgotten. But if there was one thing more unnerving to him than being dishonest with himself, it was to be proven wrong so condescendingly. Chase seemed to anticipate this outrage, since he was now giving Gerald

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the kind of wounded look he reserved for times when his misery was unavoidable, and he meant to expose before all who could see the cold and utterly selfish hearts of his parents. While Gerald knew he probably shouldn’t even bother, he dropped to his knee and put his hands on the boy’s shoulders. He looked Chase in the eyes the way he thought all practiced parents did, as if he were gazing into a book that he had read countless times—one he understood completely, word-for-word.

“Listen, I really think it would mean a lot to Mr. Lipscomb if you just visited with him for a little while.”

“Where are you gonna be?”

“I’ll be right outside in the truck. There’ll be nothing to worry about.” He let go of his son’s shoulders and studied his face.

From what he could tell, the boy considered it, at the very worst, an unpleasant chore. Satisfied, Gerald stood up. “Does that sound okay?”

Chase didn’t say anything. He tucked his chin inside his jacket and stared at the floor.

“Don’t do that,” Gerald said. “You look like you’re four years old, for Christ’s sake.” He made the boy look him in the face.

“Tell you what. As soon as he finds his wallet and hands you the money, just hustle on outside and I’ll let you drop the plow. Just make sure you stand by the garage and wait until I see you. Do you hear me?”

The boy nodded.

“Okay.” Gerald grabbed each of his boots and slipped them on. “Now you make sure to be nice to Mr. Lipscomb.

Remember to speak up, so he can hear you.”

He opened the door and slipped outside, shutting both doors tightly behind him. At that instant, a guilty feeling gripped him with the force of the cold, and instead of getting to the driveway, he turned around and watched his son untie his boots and pry them from each foot. He stood on his tiptoes so that Chase could see him when he turned around, and when he did, Gerald waved him on, mouthing something like It will be all right. When Chase was gone, he turned around and nearly stumbled off the stoop, as his eyes were much too used to the light inside to have prepared themselves for the thick, nearly unpierceable darkness of the woods. Finding his footing, he noticed that the snowflakes were now as big as quarters.

In the hour it took him to plow the driveway, he thought about the old man. Though at times it felt like a pain in the ass,

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when he was finally out in the truck plowing the man’s driveway, the honorable feeling it gave him—doing something generous and getting little in return—almost made it seem worth it. And the more he thought about it, the more these feelings of duty and compassion—of finding something in his own character that by far outshone all his various imperfections—accumulated like the ceaseless drift of snow that was forever impeding his progress. That he never once saw Chase standing by the garage, waiting for his chance to drop the plow, did not bother him in the least. If the company of his son lent even the slightest bit of happiness to what short time was left for the man, then Gerald felt he had done something redeemable. How could someone be an asshole and still do something as selfless as this?

While the metal blade scraped and thumped over the hardpacked snow, he pictured Chase and the old man gluing together the wings of a model airplane in some cozy upstairs bedroom, a smile on the man’s face that perhaps recalled days when he taught his own kids how to build things. But Gerald wasn’t sure if the man had ever had a wife, let alone kids. This thought alone made him feel such sadness, he was sure he wanted to stay for the hot chocolate the man almost always insisted he have afterwards.

When he had finished pushing most of the snow out across the highway, and the rest had been dozed into a mound next to the garage that was taller than the truck, he killed the ignition and listened to the engine tick and settle for a few moments before climbing down out of the cab. The air was almost too cold to breathe; it stung his lungs and eyes. But instead of rushing inside to get warm, he stuffed his hands in his coat pockets and took a long, satisfying look down the length of the driveway at the work he’d done. There were bits here and there that he’d missed, but the smooth, glistening path of packed snow and blacktop he had cleared was admirable work. Though the spots of asphalt were slowly dusted with white, there was something oddly fulfilling about having thwarted the elements, if only temporarily.

He was almost giddy with pride when removing his boots in the entryway, and surprised at himself for actually thinking about refusing the man’s money. He tried to conjure the look on the man’s face, but couldn’t get past imagining the awkward time he’d have explaining, and then repeating his reasons to him. Still, there seemed to be no better way to cap off the night than to reveal to this dependent man the depths of Gerald Buckley’s generosity, even if it meant it would cost him money in the winter months to come. For

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how in the hell could he charge him again afterwards?

He was almost sure that they were upstairs, completing the intricate model airplane of his daydream, when he walked into the room and found Mr. Lipscomb and Chase both on the leather recliner together. Even though his son was getting too big for this sort of thing, it touched Gerald to see that his son had indulged the old man by sitting next to him on the arm of the chair to look at his navy fighter jet books or whatever the hell it was they were doing.

“All done,” Gerald said. “Your driveway’s good to go.”

“I was just explaining to your son how we specially manufactured metal for the F-22s.”

“Well,” Gerald said. “I bet that made Chase’s day.” He gave them both a smile that felt, for the first time in many months, genuine. “All right, kiddo. You ready to hit the road?”

If there was one thing Gerald could tell about his sons, it was when they were upset about something. And when he looked at the boy now, he could see immediately that Chase had gone into one of his moods. There was something cold and blank about the way he sat there.

“Looks like someone’s tired,” he said. “Say goodnight to Mr. Lipscomb.”

He wondered if Chase had said something to offend the old man—he had a tendency to be a little on the abrasive side, something his mother was often left to apologize for. Once, she and the boy had been in the grocery store, and he had asked, within earshot of the lady he was referring to, why that person over there would put so much food in her cart when she was already so fat.

Silence for him was often one of the side-effects of remorse.

“Hope you guys had a good visit,” Gerald said. “I’m sure you had lots to talk about.” He put his hands in his pockets and, realizing he looked uptight, withdrew them just as quickly. “That driveway took a lot longer than I thought.”

Despite the uncomfortable feeling he had, he was not done talking. There was an empty, oppressive quality to the room that kept him filling the awkward gaps with self-sustaining, meaningless speech about the abundance of snow, the various driveways around the county that kept him busy most of the winter, a few of the problems he was having with his plow. He kept wondering why Chase wouldn’t move, and soon he felt the thin fabric of his jabbering beginning to wear away until he was left standing in the middle of the room in quiet shreds with nothing to do except pretend to admire the woodwork on the stairway banister. And just

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like that he realized he was exhausted and wanted very badly to go home.

“You about ready, Chase?”

Finally Chase slid off the arm of the chair, and when his feet hit the floor, Gerald noticed something that put a chill in his blood.

He didn’t know what the hell it was, but there was something almost alarming about the way his son was behaving. The more he stood there and thought about it, the more he realized something was wrong with this whole damn scene from the moment he came in the door, his son sitting so unusually close to the old man, with that empty look on his face. And just when he thought he was able to piece together just what was so unsettling about it, it was gone.

“I sure do appreciate all your help,” Mr. Lipscomb said.

He turned his gaze to one of the frost-covered windows. “Boy, it’s still snowing like the dickens outside, isn’t it?”

Gerald nodded mindlessly. He looked down the hallway at Chase putting his coat on, his movements careful and deliberate.

Then he turned to look at Mr. Lipscomb and, for the first time in his life, felt with overpowering certainty that he was capable of wrapping his hands around a man’s throat and watching him suffocate to death.

“There’s no charge for the driveway,” Gerald said. “We’ll be going now.”

He left the man sitting in his recliner and walked slowly down the hallway, wanting badly to look back but never doing so.

When he reached the entryway, he and Chase went through the dreary business of pulling on their boots and tying them.

“Just forget them,” Gerald said. “You can tie them in the truck.”

He held the door open for Chase and guided him out onto the porch. When they were both safely off the stoop, it was all Gerald could do to keep from picking the boy up and carrying him the rest of the way.

Once they were back on the highway, he could barely focus.

All he could think to do was put the truck in four-wheel drive and speed down the two-lane stretch of highway as fast as the weather would allow. He wondered if his wife would still be up when they got back.

After a while, he glanced over at his son and found him doing the same thing he had been doing since they’d started driving: staring out the window, watching the snow-capped landscape pass by.

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“Everything okay?”

Chase looked at his father and nodded. There was something frighteningly casual in the way he did this. As if he were bored.

“Did you have an okay time at Mr. Lipscomb’s?”

The boy shrugged. There was nothing to decipher in this.

“Is anything wrong? Did something happen there that I should know about?”

“No,” the boy said. He stared at the seat for a moment and then looked out the windshield. “You’re driving really fast.”

Gerald looked up and gave a little jolt, realizing that he had never found himself barreling along so fast in such miserable conditions. He let his foot off the accelerator and allowed the truck to coast to an acceptable speed, keeping a tight grip on the wheel and listening to the soft, barely audible spray of snow hitting his wheel wells, and when he had it down to 30, he forced a smile at Chase, though he could feel himself sweating.

“Everything’s okay,” he said. “Your dad’s been driving in this stuff all his life.”

He steered with greater attentiveness, as if to prove he was being careful. Then, as they passed the state park: “Mr. Lipscomb didn’t do anything strange, did he?”

The boy was studying his father now. He looked genuinely puzzled.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “Why are you asking me this?”

“It’s just, I don’t know,” Gerald said. “I just thought he may have done something while I was out plowing, is all.”

“Like what?”

“Never mind.” He focused on driving. “I guess the answer is no.”

The snow continued to fall. They were still about ten miles from home, and though Gerald was driving under the speed limit, he couldn’t get them home fast enough.

“Are you buckled up?” he asked.

“No,” Chase responded. His honesty surprised Gerald.

“Well, do your father a favor and buckle up.” He reached over and patted his son’s leg. “Okay, pal?”

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Sarah Bowman, ’99, has attended the University of Iowa Summer Writing Program and completed an Independent Study in Poetry at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a tenure track instructor of English at Wright College, one of the City Colleges of Chicago. She and her husband Mark Matson, '98, live in Chicago with their son Niall.

Stacy Cartledge's first book, Within the Space Between, is due out from Spuyten Duyvil at some point. He recently entered the tenure-track at Delaware County Community College near Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife and three children.

Dawn Comer lives in Defiance, Ohio, where she does occasional editing work and teaches creative writing at Defiance College. She continues to have one cat (Bruce) and one husband (Todd), though she now has two children (Elliot and Lucy). Lately Dawn has been reading way too much about Asperger's Syndrome and Autism Spectrum Disorders, leading local friends to predict her next book will deal with ASDs. And even though she swears she's not planning anything like that, she will admit they are most likely right. But first she must put the finishing touches on Born Beneath Pedro's Sombrero, Raised in a Corn Palace, home to “The Thing Is...”

Clare Christina is a writer and freelance editor recently transplanted to Queens, NY. Her work has been seen and heard on stages all over Chicago and in several homemade chapbooks and zines. Clare is currently doing research for a novel about Austin, MN in the early 1990s and organizing with the NYC chapter of The Icarus Project, a radical mental health collective. She received her BA in English from St. Cloud State University and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame.

With a grant from the Puffin Foundation, Renée E. D’Aoust is currently completing Travels with Truffle: A Canine Tour of America. She presented “American Flamingoes,” a monologue based on her journey across the country, at the 2008 &NOW Festival. D’Aoust was awarded a 2008 National Endowment for the Arts Journalism Institute for Dance Criticism Fellowship at the American Dance Festival. She has received two “Notable Essay” mentions in Best American Essays (2006 and 2007), won 2nd Place in the 2007 essay contest sponsored by New Letters, and has numerous publications to her credit, including, most recently, Open Face Sandwich and the forthcoming Reading Dance, edited by Robert Gottlieb (Pantheon 2008).

D’Aoust holds degrees from Columbia University and the University of Notre Dame—she lives in northern Idaho and teaches at North Idaho College.

Amy Faith De Betta remains in hiding in the desert, loves her Sig Sauer, the sand and the heat, tries very hard never to take herself seriously and is desperately trying to finish a novel while ignoring the distractions that amuse her. Go Irish!

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Not much to say really, says Lisa De Niscia. I'm unemployed in Los Angeles, and it's gonna be HOT this weekend though it's only spring. I'm not complaining. I love the heat. Terrible about that dude who was killed by the shark a few days ago at Solana Beach. Wonder how Hoosiers are gonna vote in their primary. Watched a crazy car chase on local TV yesterday. See, not much to say.

S. D. Dillon received his MFA from Notre Dame in 2004. He then worked for three years at various New York publishers before returning to his native Michigan last fall to work in the green energy industry.

Mary M. Dixon has an MFA in creative writing and an MA in theology from the University of Notre Dame, an MA in English from the University of Nebraska and a BA in Art, English, and Education from Hastings College in Nebraska. She teaches writing classes for Hastings College, Liberty University, and Regent University. In addition to writing, she produces visual art. Her upcoming book, Eucharist: Enter the Sacred Way is due out in the summer 2008 from Franciscan University Press.

Tony D'Souza is the author of the novels Whiteman and The Konkans. He and his girlfriend are expecting a baby girl in August who they plan on naming Gwen. They live in the sticks in northern California near the Oregon border where the grass is green and the trees are tall.

Jaclyn Dwyer is currently enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Notre Dame. Her work has appeared in 3:am Magazine and is forthcoming in The Cortland Review. She recently interviewed A. M. Homes for the Notre Dame Review and was awarded a full scholarship to the New York State Summer Writers’ Institute.

Danna Ephland lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan where, according to Susan Ramsey, “...you can’t throw a brick without hitting a poet.” A poet and veteran teaching-artist, her poems have appeared in magazines including Indiana Review, Rhino, Permafrost and Letterhead. She is especially proud of a collaborative poem with poet Paulette Beete which appears in an anthology by Soft Skull Press titled, Saints of Hysteria: A Half Century of Collaborative American Poetry.

This summer David Ewald ('03) will move from San Francisco to Denver, where he is set to begin teaching at Front Range Community College in the fall.

Esteban (Steve) I.V. Galindo lives and works in Orange County, California. He's published a little here and there, but mostly in The Capistrano Dispatch. He'd like to get out a little more but his wife says be has to stay home. He'd like to introduce his son to the Batman and Indiana Jones film franchises, but his wife says that Junior is still too little. He'd like

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to land a show on The Food Network but his wife says that Emeril has more charisma. He loves his wife.

Chris Gerben is a PhD student at the University of Michigan. He can be reached at his website— http://www.umich.edu/~cgerben Sean Keith Henry, M.F.A. 1996, was born on a beautiful island in the Caribbean. He is the author of published stories in Callaloo, Salamander and Obsidian II. His novel "LIMBO" was published by Akashic Books, New York in 2004. He lives in Southern California but also divides his time between Trinidad and Norway. His second novel is forthcoming!

C. Kubasta lives in Wisconsin & enjoys the perks of adjunct teaching: no committee meetings. She recently won Marian College's undergraduate adjunct teaching award, which makes her feel slightly better about not writing or submitting enough.

Alan Lindsay's novel A. was published in 2004. His novel-in-progress, Living with Tina, will have been published, God willing, under some title or other, in 2010, providing it will have been finished by then. His other publications-poems, plays, essays, short stories-numerous enough, he supposes, are mostly impossible to find, and hardly worth mentioning.

William McGee, Jr. is a graduate of the Notre Dame Creative Writing Program. He lives in Joliet, Illinois with his wife and two daughters.

Corey Madsen received his BA from the University of Michigan and his MFA from the University of Notre Dame. He currently resides in Carbondale, Colorado.

Tom Miller lives in Pittsburgh, where he works as adjunct faculty at Duquesne University and moonlights as an EMT. His work recently appeared in Knock, Brown Paper, and the anthology Dark Distortions.

Rumit Pancholi received his MFA in Creative Writing from Notre Dame in 2008. He's concurrently working on his second book of poems, a collection of short stories, and several other quasi-prose projects. While at Notre Dame, Rumit received honors from Black Warrior Review, The Atlantic Monthly, and Iron Horse Literary Review, among others.

James Matthew Wilson will become Assistant Professor of the Humanities at Villanova University this fall. His poetry and critical essays continue to appear in Contemporary Poetry Review, Modern Age, Christianity & Literature, and other places.

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Creation Stories—a chapbook of poems by Amy Wray Irish—is now available from Green Fuse Press at www.greenfusepress.com. Amy (MFA 98) has also been published in 100 Words, Apocalypse, Ariel, Neologisms, River King Poetry Supplement, and Wazee (www.wazeejournal.org). She continues to write and reside in Colorado with her husband and son.

Christina Yu is a 2008 graduate of the MFA program—where she was the Diversity Fellow, a Sparks summer intern at Hachette Book Group, and proud captain of the Innertube Water Polo team. She is also a 2005 graduate of Dartmouth College—where she was a finalist for the Rhodes scholarship and awarded the Perkins prize for excellence in English. Her fiction appears in Gargoyle, Indiana Review, and the 2008 Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories anthology.

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The Notre Dame Review is an independent, non-commercial magazine of contemporary American and international fiction, poetry, criticism and art. Our goal is to present a panoramic view of contemporary art and literature - no one style is advocated over another. We are especially interested in work that takes on big issues by making the invisible seen, that gives voice to the voiceless - work that gives message form through aesthetic experience.

In addition to showcasing celebrated authors like Nobel laureates Seamus Heaney and Czeslaw Milosz, the Notre Dame Review introduces readers to authors they may have never encountered before, but who are doing innovative and important work. $15.00 for a one-year subscription. $30.00 for a two-year subscription.

Mail To: The Notre Dame Review 840 Flanner Hall University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN 46556 www.nd.edu/~ndr/review.htm

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The writers at Notre Dame 2008: Back Row: Jaclyn Dwyer, Rumit Pancholi, Alicia Guarracino, Jarrett Haley, Raul Jara, Jared Randall, Grant Osborn, Kristen Eliason, Veronica Fitzpatrick, Brian Lysholm, Mike Valente, the brow of Justin Perry Front Row: Brenna Casey, Christina Yu, Rachael Lee, Desmond Kon, Susan Blackwell-Ramsey, Silpa Swarnapuri, Stephanie White, Jessica Martinez, Ryan Smith, a very dapper Darin Graber